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Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
by deepsun 4mo ago
Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
- Matticus_Rex 4mo agoEven if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.
- phkahler 4mo agoYou want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.
- Matticus_Rex 4mo agoAgain, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified. People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
- pyuser583 4mo agoI’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked - always have been. Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems. As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand. People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities. Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale. Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion. All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances. Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
- deepsun 4mo agoAgree, subsidies should go only to calorie-rich foods that can lessen a widespread famine in case of big troubles. Not to the freshest cucumbers.
- crote 4mo agoName one country which is fully self-sustaining. Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
- fra 4mo agoFrance, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self-sufficiency_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).
- anticorporate 4mo agoYou can't just use percentages for this kind of thing. Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear. We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
- phainopepla2 4mo agoIn the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
- pardon_me 4mo agoI'll die before I go without my curvy yellow lumps of mush.
- pyuser583 4mo agoPeople substitute very quickly and happily. I remember food shortages during Covid. Nowhere near as bad as toilet paper shortages. I can go without chocolate for a few days. Weeks, maybe. But if it becomes months, I get crabby.
- AngryData 4mo agoIt is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans. And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.