Farm subsidies are both the single most important national security policy a nation can have, and an incredibly inexpensive yet extremely effective insurance policy.
The Omnivore's Dilemma points out that the food economy doesn't even behave like the normal economy - supply is variable due to weather (bumper crop vs famine year) but demand is inelastic, people generally eat the same amount year-to-year. How do you grow your food business if people only eat so much? One method is to increase portion sizes.
Europe also does some very heavy subsidies. Without subsidies, a lot of farming just goes away due to the uncompetitiveness in labor vs the southern hemisphere. The Amazon would be replaced completely with farms for rich countries. It's not surprising that countries just don't want so much of the country basically depopulating.
- Use arable land where it exists, not just where the cheapest labor is
- Don't do deforestation or other such things
I would like policies that directly address this:
- Legal immigration fairly moves the people the arible land, rather than moving the farming to the cheap people. The goal would be in 200 years there is enough economic development and immigration that there is no longer global scale labor arbitrage.
- Paying to protect the land we directly care about directly protects that land, and removes the incentive to farm there after all. (If you farm there, you loose the preservation rent.)
Farmers in brazil are notoriously far-right-wing, just like else where, and so paying the gov to not farm has other return-to-center-and-sanity benefits too.
The US government also has a program of subsidizing/mandating biofuels that raise prices of both food and fuel for supposed environmental and energy security reasons that mostly don't pass a sniff test.
Yeah, biofuels is more of a PR program. You could cut that one without any real harm, and you could definitely cut back on corn in general and promote some other stuff or move things around
The risk is going back to the time where we left corn in piles to rot. That's not harmful in any kind of immediate sense, but losing that energy to waste heat instead of converting it back into usable energy is less than ideal.
> and you could definitely cut back on corn
It's not that you try to grow too much corn, but its yield can be pretty unpredictable. Last year, with favourable weather, yields around here were nearly 100 bushels per acre higher than pre-harvest estimates! That is a hell of a lot of extra product that nobody ever expected before the combines started rolling.
And if you plan for those freak years every year, you're going to end up short more often than not. There is a lot of guesswork involved. That is what ethanol was originally intended to be: A way to buffer that guesswork.
> in general and promote some other stuff
Like what?
1. The consumer dictates what you grow. The consumer loves corn (mostly because it turns into meat). You'd have to compel the consumer to eat something else, and that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle. Many organizations have been trying to get people away from meat for decades and meat consumption is only going up. Meat doesn't necessarily have to come from corn, granted, but other options are more expensive. The consumer isn't going to pay more for meat either.
2. Corn equipment is compatible with other human foods (beans, wheat, etc.) that are also being grown in the crop rotation. If you expect a corn/bean/wheat farmer to start growing carrots in place of corn, good luck. They'd never be able to afford the capital expenditure to add carrot equipment to their lineup.
Besides keeping food costs low, as other commenters mentioned, I certainly think it's desirable to keep our agriculture sector from devolving into a small number of large corporations. I trust small independent farmers a lot more than I trust large corporations to take care of the land and to produce healthy food (which isn't to say independent farmers are perfect by any means).
Avoiding starvation on a country level is a good goal of government, even if it isn't perfectly efficient. That can mean price floors and things that are not optimal for cars or toys.
