Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Ending agricultural subsidies

Yakk · 11-22-2005, 03:03 PM

Food sources are a very important factor in national defence. If your nation is dependant on food imports for its very survival, a blockade or trade embargo can literally starve your nation to death.

For most nations, making your nation self-sustaining in food production is relatively cheap, compared to the costs of other defence measures. As a wealthy nation, artificially maintaining an agriculture base has a good security:cost ratio. So you waste money and dump food onto the world market.

At the least, my meagre knowledge seems to indicate that was the source of argricultural subsidies in the USA -- a defence measure to keep farm production up.

Sadly, this causes massive economic hardship to people from poor nations who cannot afford these kinds of subsidies, and have a relatively high efficiency at producing food (compared to other goods).

In addition, subsidies for special interests are also very hard to dislodge in general. In the USA, agricultural subsidies mainly go to the states with "extra power" in the US Senate. In effect, the votes of farmers are worth more than the votes of non-farmers in both presidential and US senate elections. So you take money from the non-farmers and give it to the farmers in the form of agricultural subsidies.

11-22-2005, 03:03 PM	#8 (permalink)
Yakk Wehret Den Anfängen! Location: Ontario, Canada	Food sources are a very important factor in national defence. If your nation is dependant on food imports for its very survival, a blockade or trade embargo can literally starve your nation to death. For most nations, making your nation self-sustaining in food production is relatively cheap, compared to the costs of other defence measures. As a wealthy nation, artificially maintaining an agriculture base has a good security:cost ratio. So you waste money and dump food onto the world market. At the least, my meagre knowledge seems to indicate that was the source of argricultural subsidies in the USA -- a defence measure to keep farm production up. Sadly, this causes massive economic hardship to people from poor nations who cannot afford these kinds of subsidies, and have a relatively high efficiency at producing food (compared to other goods). In addition, subsidies for special interests are also very hard to dislodge in general. In the USA, agricultural subsidies mainly go to the states with "extra power" in the US Senate. In effect, the votes of farmers are worth more than the votes of non-farmers in both presidential and US senate elections. So you take money from the non-farmers and give it to the farmers in the form of agricultural subsidies. __________________ Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.