Ending Farm Subsidies

C Fodder

Sod the market, the market doesn't have children

The truest comment I've heard in a good while and the best reply to "market economics"

mike65

What do the farmers here think about the New Zealand big bang of the 1980s?

Mike.

edanto

fly_agaric wrote:

because not everybody farms - but everbody does eat food!

That makes no sense to me. But just to test your logic, let's extend it to some other things that everybody does. The government should subsidise clothes, electricity, toilet paper.....forget about it. And seriously, we're not going to run out of food. No species that's around today ever has.

C Fodder, thanks for providing such a clear analysis. The problem of how to ensure the quality of imports is probably solvable. But there is obviously a real difficulty in providing fair rules where there is such a disparity in the local value of the same currency around the world.

You mention the great advances that we've made in the past half century. A good deal of that could be attributed to our access to fair European markets and bundles of aid. So, maybe that would do the trick for poor countries.

Say cotton farmers, for example. Oxfam calculate that the value of US cotton subsidies in 01/02 was 30% greater than the overall value of the product in the US. Is that not the same behaviour they used to mock the USSR for?

Anyway, the value of the US cotton subsides, $3.9bn, is also greater than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso. The same subsidies cost Burkina Faso about 12% of it's GDP. That's one of the poorest countries in the world, so poor that a lot of it's debt was cancelled this year. My point is that this is a population being hurt by policies designed to buy votes in the west.

So yeah, there may be bad effects on our rural communities if we phase out subsidies, but are those people in danger of starving to death? I don't think so - they might have to sell the farm and we might have to import a bit of milk etc, but we'll all be okay.

Capt'n Midnight

Cotton - its the reason the Aral Sea is dry - the two main rivers flowing into have a greater combined flow than the Nile - or they did until the water was diverted into cotton fields.

fly_agaric

edanto wrote:

That makes no sense to me. But just to test your logic, let's extend it to some other things that everybody does. The government should subsidise clothes, electricity, toilet paper.....forget about it.

Sorry, I was being a bit flippant. I didn't think I'd be taken so literally. I would not like to see a situation develop where the EU is dependent on food imports of basic staples. If some kind of subsidies are needed to stop that from happening so be it.

edanto wrote:

And seriously, we're not going to run out of food. No species that's around today ever has.

All I can say is you are very naive if you believe that.
We don't need to "run out" either - we just need to have a shortage, or for some foriegn supplies we depend on to be unavailable for some reason or other. You think there's some natural law that says famines can only happen in Africa?

C Fodder wrote:

Subsidies have played a vital role since the end of the second world war in securing food security for Europe and massively improving the diet of europeans. We have no thoughts about being able to afford a steak dinner or buy a range of cakes and confectionery or fruit and veg. Our grandparents weren't in this position apart from the lucky rich few. It is time for subsidies in their present and historical forms to go but the picture is bigger than a few farmers getting excessive cash payments for doing nothing.

Sounds like sense to me.

edanto

fly_agaric wrote:

Sorry, I was being a bit flippant.

I'd better check the batteries in my sarcasm detector.

But am I naive to say we won't run out of food? I'd say it's more a confidence based on our history. The 'run out of food' worry was very prevalent 50 or 60 years ago, before the green revolution.... but I'll get into all that on your thread about food shortages if you want.

There isn't a natural law that says food shortages only happen in Africa, just a colonial heritage, discriminatory trade practices and the heat. Plus food shortages aren't their only or biggest problem... again, that'd be a whole other thread.

I started this thread to see if there was a consensus about the need to end farm subsidies and if anyone had any bright ideas about the system to replace them with. At least most of us are agreed they need to go - and maybe we can debate any alternatives when they're presented to us by the EU.

Capt'n Midnight

Oddly enough famines/food shortages are a a compartivaly recent ( since the move to the cities from farmers ) thing usually associated with buy and selling and controlling the supply of food.