7 ms·

The problem is that these natural market corrections, when they occur with farming, have historically resulted in famine. Natural, self-correcting famine maybe

The problem is that these natural market corrections, when they occur with farming, have historically resulted in famine. Natural, self-correcting famine maybe, but all the same allowing it to occur is understandably undesirable.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
The decline of famine in the developed world long predates the massive farm subsidies that exist in the United States. The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650s. There has never been a major famine in the USA, yet the subsidies we now think of as the Farm Bill only really started in the 1920s.
- hinkley 7y ago
  > The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650's. That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's). If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    England would probably have been fine, considering they were mostly getting inefficient calories like beef butter, milk, and beef from Ireland. Although your citation of the outflows of food is actually a great way to prove my point. There was plenty of food to feed everyone even in the darkest of days, with farming techniques far less efficient than the ones we have now. But shitty economic policy (too small plots of land for tenant farmers, the whole landlord tenant system, colonialism, etc.) and failure to subsidize food consumption for the poor led to really terrible outcomes. Yet there was plenty of food production even when there were no subsidies.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      The argument goes that starvation is usually a logistics/corruption problem as much as anything. Technically you can consider the math of supply without it, but practically it matters more than most other things. Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?
      - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
        The Great Irish Famine was systemic problem, not a logistics nor corruption problem.
        Avshalom 7y ago
        what is a systemic problem that is not a logistic or corruption problem
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      That’s the point. Although the English had all sorts of high minded idealism about the potential for creating dependency amounts the Irish, they supervised the genocide in Ireland.
  - turk73 7y ago
    What genocide happened in the US in the 1840s? Are you talking about the Civil War in the 1860s?
mikepurvis 7y ago
One way of alleviating the boom/bust effect is some form of supply management, such as what exists for diary products in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada) It's effectively a subsidy, but the subsidy is provided by the actual consumers of the goods (via government price fixing) rather than out of the general revenue pot. Individual farmers get grouchy that they're no allowed to have more cattle than their quota, but the reality is that those limitations protect a commons— if there were no restrictions and every farmer took on a few more cattle, there'd be oversupply, the price would crash, and they'd all be headed to Ottawa for a bailout. Yay free markets. Note that this whole system is an interesting bit of political football in Canada, because the party that you'd expect to oppose it ideologically (the Conservatives) in fact do not, because their support base includes the rural farmers who benefit from it. The farmers are also well organized and well funded in terms of their lobbying operation. There was a recent mini-scandal about their presence at the Conservative party's national convention, see: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lobby-briefing-binder-found-on-the-floor-of-the-conservative-convention https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lob...
- khuey 7y ago
  This is true in the US too. Small government Republicans love farm subsidies because farm owners vote Republican. The position of Iowa in the Presidential nominating system constrains the Democrats fairly severely too.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    It’s because of the realities of the electoral college. The less populated states full of farmers have an out of proportion share of electoral votes.
    - specialist 7y ago
      khuey may be referring to the presidential primary calendar, where the conservatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have outsized influence by going first: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-presidential-election-calendar.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-p...
ajross 7y ago
Oh please. Clearly there's a middle ground between outrageous subsidies and obscene overproduction and ... "famine". We don't need to go full libertarian on these farms. We just need to stop growing so much junk.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
twblalock 7y ago
If a market correction is caused by overproduction there won't be a famine. The level of production will decrease to align with consumer demand (as opposed to government subsidy demand which is far higher).
- mattmanser 7y ago
  That's not how life works. You ever seen the graph of foxes and bunnies? Where all the foxes starve when they kill all the bunnies? That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Or just the right amount of food producers go bust, and things are stable. And then there's an episode of wheat rust/grasshoppers/drought/flooding, and then you're not producing enough food and people die. (Or, to riff off of what vcf1 said, then you have to spend less of it feeding cattle, and more of it feeding people. That's survivable, at least.)
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    A market-priced system for food in the United States would still allow for a massive amount of slack in the case of a supply shock. The typical American probably eats 20-30% more calories than are properly healthy for them, and many of their calories come from extremely feed and land-intensive sources like beef. Of course, you wouldn't switch to this all at once. You'd announce that you are gradually cutting farm subsidies over the next ten years. The least profitable (efficient) operations would close. This would also develop slack in the form of unused land, which could be held in reserve in case of a supply shock like the one you're hypothesizing.
    - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
      This might work if income were more equally distributed. If food becomes more scarce and the typical American has to eat 20-30% fewer calories, the price of food will spike significantly. People at the bottom will be priced out and will starve without government intervention. Managing the food supply to make sure there's always a healthy surplus makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with holding land in reserve, as you're suggesting, is that it takes at least an entire growing season to start producing from that land. That might be too long in the case of a famine.
nwallin 7y ago
Historically. Food is a global commodity and is largely fungible. If every farmer in the US went bankrupt overnight we could easily sustain ourselves by importing food from everywhere else. Famine is really only a possibility in crushingly impoverished (much of Africa) or criminally mismanaged (Venezuela) economies. The potato blight was a secondary cause of the Irish potato famine, the primary causes were poverty and (English) government incompetence. (or malice, if you prefer) The United States has nothing to worry about.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Just because a farmer goes bankrupt doesn't mean the farmland and farm equipment disappears. It will still produce.
basementcat 7y ago
Some countries avoid a "famine" of petroleum with a strategic reserve. Some countries already have a strategic rice reserve.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

The decline of famine in the developed world long predates the massive farm subsidies that exist in the United States. The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650s. There has never been a major famine in the USA, yet the subsidies we now think of as the Farm Bill only really started in the 1920s.

hinkley 7y ago
> The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650's. That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's). If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  England would probably have been fine, considering they were mostly getting inefficient calories like beef butter, milk, and beef from Ireland. Although your citation of the outflows of food is actually a great way to prove my point. There was plenty of food to feed everyone even in the darkest of days, with farming techniques far less efficient than the ones we have now. But shitty economic policy (too small plots of land for tenant farmers, the whole landlord tenant system, colonialism, etc.) and failure to subsidize food consumption for the poor led to really terrible outcomes. Yet there was plenty of food production even when there were no subsidies.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    The argument goes that starvation is usually a logistics/corruption problem as much as anything. Technically you can consider the math of supply without it, but practically it matters more than most other things. Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?
    - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
      The Great Irish Famine was systemic problem, not a logistics nor corruption problem.
      - Avshalom 7y ago
        what is a systemic problem that is not a logistic or corruption problem
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That’s the point. Although the English had all sorts of high minded idealism about the potential for creating dependency amounts the Irish, they supervised the genocide in Ireland.
- turk73 7y ago
  What genocide happened in the US in the 1840s? Are you talking about the Civil War in the 1860s?

mikepurvis 7y ago

One way of alleviating the boom/bust effect is some form of supply management, such as what exists for diary products in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada) It's effectively a subsidy, but the subsidy is provided by the actual consumers of the goods (via government price fixing) rather than out of the general revenue pot. Individual farmers get grouchy that they're no allowed to have more cattle than their quota, but the reality is that those limitations protect a commons— if there were no restrictions and every farmer took on a few more cattle, there'd be oversupply, the price would crash, and they'd all be headed to Ottawa for a bailout. Yay free markets. Note that this whole system is an interesting bit of political football in Canada, because the party that you'd expect to oppose it ideologically (the Conservatives) in fact do not, because their support base includes the rural farmers who benefit from it. The farmers are also well organized and well funded in terms of their lobbying operation. There was a recent mini-scandal about their presence at the Conservative party's national convention, see: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lobby-briefing-binder-found-on-the-floor-of-the-conservative-convention https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lob...

khuey 7y ago
This is true in the US too. Small government Republicans love farm subsidies because farm owners vote Republican. The position of Iowa in the Presidential nominating system constrains the Democrats fairly severely too.
- scarface74 7y ago
  It’s because of the realities of the electoral college. The less populated states full of farmers have an out of proportion share of electoral votes.
  - specialist 7y ago
    khuey may be referring to the presidential primary calendar, where the conservatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have outsized influence by going first: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-presidential-election-calendar.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-p...

ajross 7y ago

Oh please. Clearly there's a middle ground between outrageous subsidies and obscene overproduction and ... "famine". We don't need to go full libertarian on these farms. We just need to stop growing so much junk.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

twblalock 7y ago

If a market correction is caused by overproduction there won't be a famine. The level of production will decrease to align with consumer demand (as opposed to government subsidy demand which is far higher).

mattmanser 7y ago
That's not how life works. You ever seen the graph of foxes and bunnies? Where all the foxes starve when they kill all the bunnies? That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Or just the right amount of food producers go bust, and things are stable. And then there's an episode of wheat rust/grasshoppers/drought/flooding, and then you're not producing enough food and people die. (Or, to riff off of what vcf1 said, then you have to spend less of it feeding cattle, and more of it feeding people. That's survivable, at least.)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  A market-priced system for food in the United States would still allow for a massive amount of slack in the case of a supply shock. The typical American probably eats 20-30% more calories than are properly healthy for them, and many of their calories come from extremely feed and land-intensive sources like beef. Of course, you wouldn't switch to this all at once. You'd announce that you are gradually cutting farm subsidies over the next ten years. The least profitable (efficient) operations would close. This would also develop slack in the form of unused land, which could be held in reserve in case of a supply shock like the one you're hypothesizing.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    This might work if income were more equally distributed. If food becomes more scarce and the typical American has to eat 20-30% fewer calories, the price of food will spike significantly. People at the bottom will be priced out and will starve without government intervention. Managing the food supply to make sure there's always a healthy surplus makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with holding land in reserve, as you're suggesting, is that it takes at least an entire growing season to start producing from that land. That might be too long in the case of a famine.

nwallin 7y ago

Historically. Food is a global commodity and is largely fungible. If every farmer in the US went bankrupt overnight we could easily sustain ourselves by importing food from everywhere else. Famine is really only a possibility in crushingly impoverished (much of Africa) or criminally mismanaged (Venezuela) economies. The potato blight was a secondary cause of the Irish potato famine, the primary causes were poverty and (English) government incompetence. (or malice, if you prefer) The United States has nothing to worry about.

Fjolsvith 7y ago
Just because a farmer goes bankrupt doesn't mean the farmland and farm equipment disappears. It will still produce.

basementcat 7y ago

Some countries avoid a "famine" of petroleum with a strategic reserve. Some countries already have a strategic rice reserve.