Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sfifs 3568 days ago
In general, the reason to have farm subsidies is to maintain sufficient farming capability to provide food to the population in case a major disruption (blockade, war etc) that makes it difficult to import food. If not present, this dependency on outside for food can be used as leverage by others and not providing population with food is recipe for civil unrest at the weakest moment.

If you don't provide farming subsidies, farming will move to countries with cheap labor and people with knowledge and capability for farming will become too few to ramp up quickly in case of emergency.