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)

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-lob...

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.

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.

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-p...

> 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.

This is effectively a regressive tax. A tax that disproportionately impacts those with young children. Largely a tax on parents.

I don't think their lobby is that powerful. There aren't that many dairy farmers, but millions that would love cheaper dairy. I wish croissants made with butter weren't so hard to find.

I suspect that the lack of butter in croissants is simply because the cost of margarine is very slightly lower than butter and thus the profit on those with margarine is higher. A half percent reduction in material cost might be a two percent increase in profits.

And as long as a substantial fraction of the customers keep buying the inferior product there will be no incentive for the introduction or wider marketing of the better one.

So stop buying crap food and tell all your family and friends to do the same.

A croissant without butter is not really a croissant in my opinion and as far as I can tell they all have butter here (Norway), here's an example: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... (they come from the Netherlands).

It’s also a side-effect of the dairy industry controlling the butter market: so they put out one poor quality product and buyers have little choice:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...

> This is effectively a regressive tax. A tax that disproportionately impacts those with young children. Largely a tax on parents

It’s a good thing the government of Canada do not suggest you give dairy products to your children anymore then :-)

There aren't that many of them, but they have an outsized influence on politics because of the role they play in the economics of rural life. Farmers are the major employers for young rural people, they pay for local services to a greater degree, and their families tend to have been active in the local economy for a long time. When the farmers in an area are doing well, typically so is the rest of the economy and vice versa.

Calling it a tax on parents is a serious reach. And while the US has dumping prices that are lower than Canada's (e.g. when they are faced with dumping product down the drain so instead pour it into an area for little), in many areas and times the prices are not far off the US.

The lack of butter croissants has nothing to do with it, as an aside. We simply have a mediocre croissant palate in Canada, so the general market variety are horrendous.

> The lack of butter croissants has nothing to do with it, as an aside

It has everything to do with a centralized marketer that can put out any grade product it wants, and consumers can either buy it at the price they say or switch to margarine/vegoil.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...

Expensive inputs further encourages substitutions, especially when the expensive input wasn’t great.

Individual people may not respond well to incentives, but industrial buyers sure do.

The grade argument is debatable. Yes, if you want a bonafide, completely authentic as in France croissant it is less easily obtained (sidenote -- there are makers who do make the higher fat, lower water butter, but there is very little demand), but if a maker is choosing between a imperceptibly different Canadian standard butter and margarine (the former indistinguishable, the latter a vile abomination), and you think that minuscule difference is the reason, you are misled.

Further it isn't expensive. Large quantity butters purchases, including special higher fat versions that aren't generally on grocery stores, are an insubstantial percentage of the cost of making a croissant.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/canadian-croissant-...

But again, the reason croissants are generally horrendous in Canada is because people just don't care. If people don't care you end up with the weird bready-things that are marketed as croissants. This is a bit of a personal peeve having just gotten back from Belgium/France a couple of months ago, and being spoiled by every hotel having extremely good croissants.

The debate over supply management is revisited at every election, and overwhelmingly Canadians buy into the notion that supply management has benefits in certain industries.

As an aside -- it's cheaper to buy milk and butter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and virtually every other urban center in Canada than in San Francisco, NYC, LA, or any other large US center. US dairy dumps their excess on secondary markets like Detroit, and it's always the "Windsor versus Detroit" sort of comparison that we hear parroted.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

The Great Irish Famine was systemic problem, not a logistics nor corruption problem.

what is a systemic problem that is not a logistic or corruption problem

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.

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).

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.

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.

“Don’t worry if food gets too expensive, you could stand to lose some weight anyway.”

I don’t think I can give a response to this that’s acceptable on HN, but wow.

Is there something wrong with what I said? Is it impolitic to observe that most Americans exist in a serious caloric surplus? I am not excluding myself here or making any moral judgment on those who do. It's just a fact, and it is relevant to the concern that Americans might starve if the food supply contracted.

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.

> Yes, because corn grows in 3 days

Our food reserves are huge.

> And panic buying also isn't a thing.

Panic buying can only eat up a tiny little fraction of a year's food supply.

> [just insults]

> 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.

Maybe that happened in pre-industrial societies, but that isn't what happens today. Today, when things go wrong, prices of some products go up a bit (e.g., meat), and people buy less of it, replacing those calories with cheaper ones (e.g., rice, corn).

The beauty of a well functioning market is that it's not centralized, things don't go wrong all at once, they happen on a gradual scale and folks can adjust.

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.)

The US produces 13 billion bushels of corn per year - that equates to 2,200 pounds of corn for every man, woman and child in the country. Those numbers sound completely implausible, but they accurately reflect the sheer absurdity of US agricultural policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

And that's just corn! We produce so much of so many other things that we would be totally fine if we cut production by a lot.

That also happens when you kill all the farmland, and deplete all the groundwater.

Except a large portion of the population can till up some backyard space and plant a garden to supplement their cellar full of canned food.

Additionally, the farmland and farm equipment that was owned by bankrupt producers will still be able to produce food after new ownership.

Gardening is a skill that many (probably most by now) people don't have.

It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

> It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

The gardener is doing it wrong if this is their result.

We may have a difference of opinion about what "medium" means, or about what "much calories" means.

When I say "medium", I mean something that is still a modest hobby, and when I say "much calories", I mean at least a few months of food for several people.

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.

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

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

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.