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Go talk to Venezuela about competitive advantage. They purposefully neglected their native food production in favour of food imports from abroad. Now they canno

Go talk to Venezuela about competitive advantage. They purposefully neglected their native food production in favour of food imports from abroad. Now they cannot source enough USD to import enough food and they are fucked. Food is a national security issue. You cannot become dependent on other countries.

grigjd3 9y ago
I think suggesting today's outcome in Venezuela as the result of intention to have imports rather than the obviously bad result of land redistribution is disingenuous. Chavez took land from farmers and gave it to people who had never farmed before. That's not intentionally relying on food imports. That's shooting yourself in the gut while on a drunken bender.
lostlogin 9y ago
And yet being protectionist isn’t great either and leads to situations exactly like the one discussed here. Obviously the Venezuelan situation is a bit more complex than described and while being able to support ones self is important, pouring money into losing sectors is wasteful. Some pretty big countries aren’t self sufficient for food and most countries aren’t self sufficient for everything. TLDR get on with your neighbours and as many others as possible.
avar 9y ago
Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries. Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics. If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national security they'd do things like maintain a strategic buffer of cheap canned goods, and certainly wouldn't be subsidizing expensive to produce calories like French cheese other animal products which are highly inefficient per produced calorie.
- zdkl 9y ago
  You're mischaracterising the issue. Cheese isn't the issue at hand. Caloric efficiencies are a valid point, but here the greater harm is done by the huge thirsty corn fields that encompass the horizon. The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming. Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting large "strictly for profit" farms into distinct units would have many benefits ecologically and possibly even help revitalise the rural towns.
  - avar 9y ago
    Cheese specifically isn't the issue at hand, but French cheese producers are one of many beneficiaries of French agricultural subsidies, but I don't see how anyone could argue that the relatively inefficient production of cheese has strategic value in the sense that you'd need to feed an otherwise starving population cheese. You'd instead at the very least just have them drink the milk directly, but more efficiently either consume the corn the cows are eating, or grow something in the grass fields the cows are using that people could eat directly. Then there's the unrelated question of whether these subsidies aren't causing a net harm on the environment in France. I don't know about that, I'm just pointing out that the argument for agricultural subsidies due to national security concerns doesn't hold up if it's being used to defend anything resembling current subsidies. That's before we even get to discussing how implausible that argument is to begin with. OK, maybe France and other EU countries would need to strategically make sure they don't become reliant on the likes of China, Russia etc. for food imports. But it makes no sense these days that France would need to be concerned that they couldn't just largely import food from Spain and Italy, who have onerous EU-imposed production quotas due to French agricultural lobbying, even though it's more efficient to produce the food there in many cases.
gambiting 9y ago
Yes, but Venezuela isn't part of the largest trading and political union on the planet. France could easily rely on food from any other EU country and they would be fine.

grigjd3 9y ago

I think suggesting today's outcome in Venezuela as the result of intention to have imports rather than the obviously bad result of land redistribution is disingenuous. Chavez took land from farmers and gave it to people who had never farmed before. That's not intentionally relying on food imports. That's shooting yourself in the gut while on a drunken bender.

lostlogin 9y ago

And yet being protectionist isn’t great either and leads to situations exactly like the one discussed here. Obviously the Venezuelan situation is a bit more complex than described and while being able to support ones self is important, pouring money into losing sectors is wasteful. Some pretty big countries aren’t self sufficient for food and most countries aren’t self sufficient for everything. TLDR get on with your neighbours and as many others as possible.

avar 9y ago

Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries. Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics. If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national security they'd do things like maintain a strategic buffer of cheap canned goods, and certainly wouldn't be subsidizing expensive to produce calories like French cheese other animal products which are highly inefficient per produced calorie.

zdkl 9y ago
You're mischaracterising the issue. Cheese isn't the issue at hand. Caloric efficiencies are a valid point, but here the greater harm is done by the huge thirsty corn fields that encompass the horizon. The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming. Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting large "strictly for profit" farms into distinct units would have many benefits ecologically and possibly even help revitalise the rural towns.
- avar 9y ago
  Cheese specifically isn't the issue at hand, but French cheese producers are one of many beneficiaries of French agricultural subsidies, but I don't see how anyone could argue that the relatively inefficient production of cheese has strategic value in the sense that you'd need to feed an otherwise starving population cheese. You'd instead at the very least just have them drink the milk directly, but more efficiently either consume the corn the cows are eating, or grow something in the grass fields the cows are using that people could eat directly. Then there's the unrelated question of whether these subsidies aren't causing a net harm on the environment in France. I don't know about that, I'm just pointing out that the argument for agricultural subsidies due to national security concerns doesn't hold up if it's being used to defend anything resembling current subsidies. That's before we even get to discussing how implausible that argument is to begin with. OK, maybe France and other EU countries would need to strategically make sure they don't become reliant on the likes of China, Russia etc. for food imports. But it makes no sense these days that France would need to be concerned that they couldn't just largely import food from Spain and Italy, who have onerous EU-imposed production quotas due to French agricultural lobbying, even though it's more efficient to produce the food there in many cases.

gambiting 9y ago

Yes, but Venezuela isn't part of the largest trading and political union on the planet. France could easily rely on food from any other EU country and they would be fine.