[colechristensen]

If you don't subsidize farming in rich countries, all your food will come from poor countries. Poor countries without standards for food safety, scruples about burning down rainforest for a few years of fertility, or worker rights or fair wages. You starve poor countries by selling off all of their food to rich countries and making what's left very expensive. What farming is left in rich countries can only possibly be made economical doing so at the largest most industrial scales. When shit hits the fan external sources get much leverage on rich countries because they don't own their own food supply and don't have the economy in place to make their own when the suppliers get disagreeable.

And folks at the grocery store aren't going to like the prices if they want their unsubsidized groceries to be grown by their own countrymen earning middle-class wages.

Subsidies right now are certainly not where they need to be. The whole thing needs to be reformed but there are basically two classes of people: rich powerful special interests that profit from the status quo, and ignorant citizens that don't understand the very basics of why anything is being done.

Ignorance and greed underly most of our problems. Which one are you guilty of?

[slyall]

Lovely argument, if only it were true. Your whole argument is all over the place, not least because a lot of food eaten in rich countries is has minimal subsidies already. Why don't you examine the world as it is today rather than how you think it is.

> "You starve poor countries by selling off all of their food to rich countries and making what's left very expensive"

The food produced in the poor country will sell for "the world price", pretty much the same everywhere. Not "cheap" in the rich countries and "expensive" in the poor ones.

I'll assume you are talking about US production. The vast majority of US crops don't need subsidies. They are heavily mechanized on cheap land (middle of Iowa etc) fairly close to markets and with good infrastructure.

[colechristensen]

It's all over the place because there's a tree of possibilities that's difficult to cover succinctly.

>The food produced in the poor country will sell for "the world price", pretty much the same everywhere. Not "cheap" in the rich countries and "expensive" in the poor ones.

Spending power around the world varies by several orders of magnitude. If there's one "world price" for a crop, that price will be incredibly cheap for rich countries and incredibly expensive for poor ones. Agricultural poor countries will not be able to afford the food they grow.

>a lot of food eaten in rich countries is has minimal subsidies already

In the US, SNAP (food stamps) costs about $75 billion per year and is about 80% of the spending on the farm bill. It's hard to think of that as anything but a subsidy, and it covers more or less all food.

There's a lot more as well...

[slyall]

> Spending power around the world varies by several orders of magnitude. If there's one "world price" for a crop, that price will be incredibly cheap for rich countries and incredibly expensive for poor ones. Agricultural poor countries will not be able to afford the food they grow.

Significant numbers of both poor and rich countries do not subsidize food today. Many agricultural products are commodities and traded at the "world price" already. This is the world you live in right now. Have a look at what is actually happening rather than speculating...

>In the US, SNAP (food stamps) costs about $75 billion per year and is about 80% of the spending on the farm bill

Food Stamps are not a subsidy to farmers, they are a welfare program for poor people. They just are part of the "farm bill" for political reasons.

[colechristensen]

>Food Stamps are not a subsidy to farmers, they are a welfare program for poor people. They just are part of the "farm bill" for political reasons.

Food stamps shape the food choices people are able to (and do) make. Giving people money to buy food and giving farmers money to produce food are two sides of the same coin.

For example:

"SNAP increases the likelihood that participants will consume whole fruit by 23 percentage points"[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

[witty_username]

> Spending power around the world varies by several orders of magnitude. If there's one "world price" for a crop, that price will be incredibly cheap for rich countries and incredibly expensive for poor ones. Agricultural poor countries will not be able to afford the food they grow.

This is just bad economics. If food is "incredibly cheap" for rich countries, and agricultural poor countries are unable to afford the food they grow, then the prices will rise. Humans can't survive without food.

[colechristensen]

>Humans can't survive without food.

When I'm saying "cheap" and "expensive" those are relative terms to the spending power of the population.

If I make $200 a day and some guy in Africa makes $2 a day and we both pay the same price for food. Either I get an incredible deal and pay basically nothing (compared to my income) for all of my food... or he starves to death because he can't afford it.

It has certainly happened. During the Irish Potato Famine, despite the potato disease going around, there was plenty of food to feed the population, they just sold it at a higher price elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Irish_f...

[witty_username]

That's true; but what I'm saying is that the guy in Africa will raise his/her price to not starve. He/she will double the price and the buyer in the rich country doesn't care. And the competition will do the same thing, as they're starving.

In the Great Famine, exporting leads to economic gain; it's just that people were poor. If you ban exports then exporters lose money and so they'll also become more poor.

Anyways, what you're saying is moot as we already have a world price for most food.

[colechristensen]

>That's true; but what I'm saying is that the guy in Africa will raise his/her price to not starve. He/she will double the price and the buyer in the rich country doesn't care. And the competition will do the same thing, as they're starving.

The people actually selling the crops in foreign markets won't starve, but these people are often not the actual farmers but middle-men. What about the people who don't farm? Food prices double and they can't just double their own prices and expect to win.

There's a huge economic correction that takes a long time if you break down barriers and the result is a lot of people starving in poor countries and a lot of farms failing in rich ones.

>In the Great Famine, exporting leads to economic gain; it's just that people were poor. If you ban exports then exporters lose money and so they'll also become more poor.

Are you defending the people who found economic gain of the exporters during the famine? 1/8 of the population died. In a closed economy there was more than enough food, prices would have adjusted themselves so that everyone could have eaten. There would have been problems with buying power to import into Ireland, but a million people wouldn't have died and another million wouldn't have fled the country.

[jfoutz]

There are also some echoes of the world wars. If your country can't feed itself, you can't support an industrial base to fight. Kinda like the highway system.

[lostlogin]

This argument doesn't hold up. By that reasoning (safety, workers rights, environmental concerns) every industry is special and deserves subsidy. Can mine be better subsidised please?

[colechristensen]

To be fair, I don't believe in free trade outside equal partners.

That is, I think trade should be completely unrestricted to foreign markets that are within some economic margin (let's say US, Japan, Canada, and Germany to come up with a very incomplete list) and in any other cases should be subject to significant restrictions.

I don't like the fact that it's nearly impossible to pay someone in America an honest wage to put together t-shirts or running shoes. I don't like the fact that I'd be hard-pressed to buy a t-shirt or a running shoe that wasn't assembled by a person who is more like a slave than not.

But also,

Food is something fundamental, something important, more important than almost anything else and really easy to export the production. We might be ok letting some industries be entirely foreign, because maybe they're less essential... basic sustenance though is in a different class of importance. It's not a fad, it'll never go away unlike many industries that seek protections when they should just be allowed to die.

[lostlogin]

Your last point is very good. It applies to other sectors too, but I'm not going to die if a few days/weeks without those other things.

[mikeash]

Your industry doesn't starve the country to death if it gets outsourced and then blocked as a weapon of war.

[thaumasiotes]

You might like to know more about Australia's experience with unsubsidizing farmers.

Or, heck, you might not like it. But I think you should know more about it anyway.

[kleiba]

Why, what experience is it?

[thaumasiotes]

From memory:

Food production (amount of food) rises, while falling as a share of GDP. Agricultural productivity (food output production per unit input) shoots up. A lot of land is repurposed from sheep to other products.

And of course, subsidy spending goes way down.

[witty_username]

I eat food from the poor country India (I live in India). Sure, food standards aren't as good, but I'm fine.

> Poor countries without standards for food safety, scruples about burning down rainforest for a few years of fertility, or worker rights or fair wages.

The wages are bad but if you don't buy from poor countries their wages will be even worse.

[icantdrive55]

Walk through the produce section at Whole Foods, or Safeway.

Play a little game. Try to find the fruit, or vegatables that arn't produced in the rich country, fair wage country, safety conscious country of Mexico.

[colechristensen]

If even a simple majority of the calories you consume come from the produce aisle, you are in a tiny elite minority.

Even then, where it was produced doesn't matter much, if it wasn't grown in Mexico or shipped in from somewhere more exotic, much of the human labor was likely done by migrant workers from Mexico anyway.

Let's not pretend that the working conditions for the unmechanized portions of most produce-related jobs are anything but appalling.

To put a fine point on it, I don't want any part of my quality of life to be put on the backs of a workforce outside the middle class (or a foreign equivalent through trade)

----

The question is – is your goal replacing all food production with foreign wage-slaves? Are you holding up the current American market for "unsubsidized" produce as a shining beacon to be emulated? If you look into it, you realize far too much of it exploits the desperate and poor and creates shitty situations everywhere it goes. Proper subsidies and market regulations could mean that you could be proud to be a part of the food economy instead of feeling like a 21st century colonialist.

[meanduck]

Everyone is egocentric. For countries, egocentric-ness is maximum.

UBI/FB like threads are filled with comments that seemed to forgot this so obvious fact of life. Its the worst thing about HN.

[colechristensen]

What point are you trying to make?

[meanduck]

No country subsidize for other countries. Certainly not for moral reasons.

Subsidizes get introduced either to score political points and/or bribes. Thats it.