[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.