I don’t understand the downvotes.

No one wants just-in-time, no-redundancies production of critical-to-life resources. You would be willing to subsidize a healthcare market to ensure hospitals didn’t have the exact supply of antibiotics on hand required “on average.” You wouldn’t want water purification plants to produce a market-optimum amount of water with no room for variation.

Why would you want that for your food supply?

Don’t get me wrong, there are other issues on hand - lack of diversification, oligopoly, etc. but the fundamental argument of “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage” isn’t a terrible idea.

> “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage”

That's not the argument, though. Government subsidies are intended as welfare programs for farmers. Far more food is currently produced than would ever be needed in the case of a shortage. We could produce a lot less and still be fine.

After the 2019 corn crop is harvested, the USDA is projecting 51.5 days of excess stocks in the United States

You can store food for 20 years. Actually having a 3+ year supply of food would cost less and provide more security than current subsidies.

Also, 51.5 days of excess stocks is not 51.5 days of food on hand.

Storage is already at a premium since the US-China trade war. Not enough storage facilities. Maybe the US should cut from the productiob subsidies and subsidize short term storage?

Understandable, and in the same vein of why it is so important for the United States to retain industrial manufacturing capacity (i.e. auto and heavy machinery makers) because you never know when you’ll need to rapidly ramp up production.

Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?

> Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?

I like it a lot. We might add a bit of an incentive for non-monoculture agriculture - different strains of wheat, for example. (There's some of that already, and we don't want all the smaller farms to do that, but some doing it might be a good idea.)

NZ stopped protecting its farmers and we're a large exporter of food and the 3rd most obese nation - all those damn famines huh?

NZ is nowhere near the size of the US though. If you face a famine in NZ, you import from Australia, China, India etc. If you have a famine in US... millions of people will be without food, it would be an insanely crazy situation (consider how many firearms are held by ordinary Americans).

The modern American life is very strongly predicated on cheap, abundant supply of _some_ kinds of nutrition (unhealthy for most, but still, something that prevents starvation even if it increases the chances of heart disease etc.)

> If you face a famine in NZ, you import from Australia, China, India

If is the key point here. We've never been anywhere close to a famine despite our farmers operating in an unprotected market.

NZ has a very small population and absolutely no systemic importance. It’s not remotely comparable to the US.

Some great exceptionalism there. So, you subsidise corn farmers because of global geopolitics? Occam's Razor suggests myriad other explanations.

Nothing you're saying makes any sense. As others have tried to say, the population + landmass of NZ make it statistically insignificant compared to US.

Which is completely irrelevant to my discussion of how removing protectionist policies increased the efficiency of our agricultural sector.

It’s relevant if your hypothesis is that it will have the same effect in the US, which I’m tired of saying at this point that it WONT.

So stopping subsidies for corn will impact other crops too? Isn’t nutrition diverse nowadays?

Edit: Answered. Corn is used as a cattle feed and hence beef prices will be impacted. It will have a chain reaction pulling down just corn subsidies.

Tangent: India used to have famines and import grains until Punjab ushered a green revolution with record wheat and rice harvests in 1960s. My grandma told me how before wheat barley used to be the nutritional source, and I for nostalgia sake asked for a barley dish. Nearly threw up.

Huh. I like barley quite a lot. Doesn't seem like it really has enough flavour to be offensive enough to induce vomiting though.

Perhaps it is not the taste but the shape/size and consistency of the boiled grain. For those who don't know, it looks like Kellogg's Smacks, but more chewy, and it can feel a bit strange to chew or to swallow.

I like it as well, nevertheless.

Sorry, should be Bajra. Pearl Millet.

Famines are closely correlated with weather and solar output disruption. I pretty much doubt subsidies can counter something like the Dalton minimum.

1. NZ has 3 times more arable land/person than, say, the United States. It could probably use the same farming methods as China did in the famine of Great Leap Forward, and still have enough food to go around.

2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't.

3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.

3. Nope. We were producing less food when our farmers were subsidized.

1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person.

You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.

Arable's a blunt classification though. In NZ we have no mountain lions preying on our sheep, which makes better use of that land. Not to mention favourable growing conditions.

It would be nice to have more mountain lions in Kansas to thin down the large deer herds.

There won't be bread riots in the US. Too much corn and wheat. We'll just eat cheap for a while.