There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now sudden

There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now suddenly one of the most important thing for your citizen has to be imported instead of being produced locally. This has lots of side effects and of course you are more at the mercy of international supply chain problems (COVID!) which cause shortage, high cost, etc. Running out of food is a really bad situation to be in. This isn't as easy as "supply and demand" to fix the market as other industries. I'm more familiar with Philippines, but they turn out to have a very poor local farming industry. You go to the grocery store, majority is imported from abroad. We are talking of a country with 110M population. Makes food expensive, and lots of people are not exactly rich over there (on top of the issue of having country side people not having jobs)