Subsidies help the local farmers to compete with farmers in low cost countries. Transportation costs are usually insignificant. So without subsidies the consumer might pay the same price, but the store just ends up sourcing the product from a different country. However, having a significant amount of food production locally has obvious strategic benefits (and I don't mean just war, even a draught could create sufficient shortages)
I’m honestly suprised the us doesn’t just have a 25%+ import tariff. Would quickly cause more domestic manufacturing.
Like why do we even import garlic from China. We have plenty of domestic ability to produce.
Now I'm not saying that subsidising farmers to produce huge crops of the same 3 crops is the best way of continuing to ensure no one goes hungry, it self evidently doesn't work given the current status quo.
However, to talk about making huge changes to these systems without stopping to consider what impact it will have on that part of society is an incredibly rose tinted view of the world.
A lot of the low food prices in the US also contribute to this poverty. The low prices come at the back of people in the food industry doing long days for shitty pay. If the “solution” to people not getting food on the table was to keep pushing food prices down then one easily end up in a situation arguing against minimum wage and workers rights.
One has to look at the whole system and not just a tiny sliver of it.
So let's funnel that 25% import tarif or money we save from not subsidizing the meat industry into the federal food stamps program.
So there's a lot of avenues that we could take, and yeah, eliminating food subsidies entirely and not giving any other kinds of aid would probably be a mistake. I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just... there's a lot of things we could change or try that wouldn't leave people to starve. Recognizing that meat is subsidized opens up doors for us to talk about whether our current system is efficient, about what behaviors our current system incentivizes. If nothing else it at least acknowledges that we are currently messing with the market, that meat prices aren't naturally low, and that we if we're comfortable with that kind of intervention, then we could at least mess with the market in different ways to promote more diverse foods.
Right now, we are artificially boosting a few segments of the food industry to frankly unhealthy levels of consumption (at least in most of the US) in order to help people afford food. It is worth considering if it is possible to help those people without propping up industries that are at least indirectly responsible for a nontrivial number of health risks and environmental challenges in the US. I don't think most people here are saying we should leave income-strapped Americans to starve (or at least I'm not), but like you said, the current status quo isn't really working, and it has some some pretty big downsides.
Even if you don't want to touch subsidies at all, at the least we could talk about stuff like checkoff programs. I find it much harder to argue that government intervention into how food is advertised is for the benefit of low-income Americans, and I think the advertising that comes from that forced tax on food is responsible for some increase in consumption.
So the consequences would be poorer people would eat less meat, while the rich continue to eat unchanged.
That is the case with anything you want more expensive. The poor people would be the ones having less of it.
Money saved one place can be spent other places. Instead of spending it on more tax breaks for the rich it could be spent on the poor providing a net gain for them.
The moment I see any mention of price increase to curb spending is probably as naive as it is dangerous.
You always make a proper analysis and do multiple changes money earned on price increases on one category of foods could be spent to reduce another category of food.
You could e.g. tax sugar and junk food and use those earning to subsidize healthier foods , making healthier food more accessible to poor people.
Take the logic of "grow all your food at home" too seriously and you end up like this guy:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/making-sandwich-sc...
Money has to come from taxes or cuts somewhere else. Likewise a tariff gives money which could be spent elsewhere.
Hence a tariff one place could be used to create tax cuts or provide other benefits in another area.
In this case what matters is if you actually have a government which is trying to look out for the poor.
America and/or North America is big enough of a domestic market to not need to export food.
Europe already has import tariffs on many American goods. Any broad import tariff actually benefits Americans more than it harms.
People import and export the weirdest shit with China. Even a small adjustment on tariffs might cause unseen ripple effect on businesses.
Our government isn't spending nearly the same amount of time and money trying to subsidize fruits and vegetables. Shouldn't we be just as worried about those products being sourced from other countries? Why are we treating animal feed so specially over other crops?
If you take the point of view that we're just trying to keep food production domestic, then it's still pretty clear that we care mostly about keeping some foods domestic -- primarily the ones that are necessary for a thriving beef and dairy industry.
Even dairy consistently gets more subsidies than fruits and vegetables. Are we really just optimizing for a worst case scenario where we literally run out of food? Does it really make sense for us to say that during a famine or a drought that milk will be an efficient use of resources? Nobody is baking bread with canola seeds, is it really more important during a famine that we have canola oil than potatoes?
Maybe this is the result of a highly researched government program about how to survive a worldwide famine. But the numbers I'm seeing aren't doing a lot to convince me that famine planning is a more likely cause than lobbying.
The US consumes a lot of corn, either directly through corn sirup, or indirectly through meat. So it does make sense to have a significant amount of domestic production of what your population actually consumes. That corn might not be healthy is another important topic on it's own.
So subsidizing local farmers isn't the same thing as optimizing for a worst case scenario. In case of a large-scale multi-year war that triggers a famine, you could still order your farmers to switch to growing potatoes, when you have enough actively harvested farmland to begin with. That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.
But I'm not saying that's the only reason for the subsidies. Lobbying definitely plays a big (the biggest) role and the largest industries have the strongest lobbying power. But when you have the strategic argument in hand, lobbying for subsidies becomes a lot easier, especially in a country that spends more on the military than any other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_production_in_the_United...
Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it more? Or is it the other way around?
My understanding is that a lot of corn uses were developed in part because of corn subsidies and requirements around ethanol. As corn became an extremely cheap material, people started looking for uses for it. And you can quickly enter a spiral there, where as corn becomes more useful, we subsidize it more, which encourages more companies to figure out how to make more stuff out of corn.
> That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.
It feels like this has looped around and that the current balance of subsidies are no longer about disaster planning. If your starting premise is that we're trying to keep production local (or at least, production capabilities local), and you're also saying that during disaster periods we can pivot to more necessary crops -- then what is the problem with changing how our current subsidies right now are distributed to encourage different crops? What do we lose?
I am skeptical that a dairy farm is going to be able to quickly shift to planting potatoes or grain, it probably doesn't have the equipment or the right land to do that. But taking your argument at face value and assuming they can make that pivot, then we could also collectively decide as a society that we produce too much meat/grain as a nation during times of peace, and we could collectively decide to subsidize local production of more diverse foods. We could subsidize the same number of farmers to produce different things.
Very much the government altering the free market. Corn subsidies are not without their consequences. Cattle do not live healthily on corn. People don't do so well on corn syrup either.
I'm not a huge fan of reducing my own meat consumption but think the government should stop subsidizing these industries.
That is as true today as it was back then. Especially when you're feeding the cattle soybeans, which are perfectly good food for humans.
Your skepticism is warranted. After all, we had a highly researched government program about how to effectively tackle a worldwide pandemic, and... well.
Root vegetables don't have much calories. So this would actually make sense.
"That means corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre" "wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million" "Other vegetables, while much more nutritious than corn, wheat or potatoes, are far less energy-dense. Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-...
“Importing” is an odd way to put it.
The same applies to plant based subsides, by the way. I'm in favour of doing away with them entirely in a gradual phase, and offering new farmers low interest loans (lock these current historical rates for first generation farmers) on land and equipment and help much of the dienfranchised and under/unemployed youth into sustainable, organic Agriculture and its ancillary businesses and let them set and the make the market for their products. Not hedge funds and wall street speculators!
This at scale could help make environmentalism profitable like nothing else.
Crop insurance could be offered privately and locally by a series of brokers and established companies and a resurgence of farmers markets as a hub of local communities could do so much good given how destroyed the food Industry is after COVID which would be ideal to ensure we don't repeat the same mitakes.
I'm a 'free market guy,' and also did horticulture Ag and focused on the 'Rolls Royce' of food (Biodynamic) in the EU and then in the US that commanded a significant premium on price and exclusivity. I understand this topic very well and has been focus of most of my adult life. By the way: Free Markets are entirely incompatible when coupled to Central Bank based fiat currencies, and impossible when the very unit of account is manipulated by centralized entities.
I could break down your entire post, but I won't, but suffice it to say your argument is missing that it's not just distorting the market and sweeping the externatlities of livestock (meat) raising but also crop and specific commodities--corn and cotton being the highest culprit on that list that use the most pesticides and poison the soil and water which should be regarded as the crime that it is: Ecocide. Which is done to feed a growing populace, which also includes vegetarians and vegans.
https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Busin...
I do think it's kind of under-discussed (it's not the only thing, a lot of niche topics like this, especially around food, don't really get covered much unless they're popular). The thing is that the people who do talk about it are usually in opposition to the meat industry, so most of the articles you find online are going to be written with a pretty obvious bias. As someone just looking for more information, that might bother you or it might not.
The EWG has decent stats online that are presented neutrally and that you can parse through if you're trying to dig into some of the details of how all of this works: https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total
The vast majority of subsidies are towards "feed" products like corn and soy. In a lot of ways, corn's impact in particular has been a lot bigger than just on meat -- we saw a big shift towards corn-based products (including ethanol) that came as a result of this massive increase in resources towards both producing corn and researching uses for it.
You can also see the impact in products like soy, which, coincidentally with being one of the second-most subsidized foods in the US, is pretty cheap in the US. If you're looking for a meat "substitute" that is actually easy to find at much cheaper prices than meat, tofu can be a very cheap replacement, at least in my experience. I'm being a little bit deceptive there, because most soy is used for animal feed, it's not like we're just throwing funds into tofu. Even there, the primary reason we're subsidizing soy is to make it easier to raise meat. But it does still have some impact outside of the meat/dairy industry.
In comparison, our subsidies towards vegetables and fruits are basically nonexistant (I think ~50 million a year for "specialty crops", but I might have my numbers wrong). It's actually kind of startling how cheap fruits and veggies in the US are given how few resources our government puts into encouraging their production.
If you're curious, you can also look into checkoff programs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_checkoff_program) that basically boil down to a mandatory tax on commodities like beef/dairy that is then redistributed to organizations that promote those commodities wholesale, rather than specific brands.
Checkoff programs are not a direct subsidy, but they raise their own set of concerns about free speech and government involvement in advertising and direct promotion of commodities that might not be in the public's best interest to be so heavily advertised.
Sorry, I know that's not the same thing as just listing an easy-read casual resource, but there aren't many neutral casual resources online, at least not that I'm aware of. Because it's a niche topic, most of the explainers are being written by people who specifically want to draw attention to the problem and are writing from a vegetarian/vegan perspective. Which is what you would expect from a topic that doesn't get brought up very often, but it does mean that if you don't want to rely on those sources, you have to do a bit of digging.
I think a populist uprising would occur almost immediately and we’d see heads on pikes with their decapitated mouths stuffed with cabbage for all to see. It would be super easy for a party to take advantage of this and they would.
In short, it would be a miserable time.
I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap.
We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics.
But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight.
The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.
That's a separate issue to whether we should value a free market. Or is it? If we're only going to support a "free market" in spots where it's politically convenient, but be enthusiastic about stripping any regulations that are politically viable, then what we'll see is a systemic stripping of regulations that protect people without power, without touching regulations of people with power.
This ends in disaster.
Removing some subsidies and making beef slightly more expensive would save money and people would just eat beef one day less/week.
I think the fact everyone has access to the food they want and is part of their culture is a major reason we generally have a peaceful and free society.
I can only imagine the resent from the middle and lower classes when “the elites” eat steaks on airplanes and they, the plebs they are, are forced to subside on processed alternatives while being forced to become a proselyte to a cause that those that can afford to ignore do.
The poor: Time to eat the rich
We might look at them to see how diet relates to agriculture subsidies.
I don't know why more people aren't trying to sell this to the "free market" crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the market being artificially biased against it in terms of price. Animal meat should cost more than it does, not just in the sense of "you're not paying for the true environmental cost", but also in the sense of, "you're not paying the actual monetary cost it takes to produce this product."
The US government throws billions of dollars into subsidizing meat and dairy production every year. Plant-based protein's growth is restricted in part because our food prices and production aren't determined just by the free market. That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.
And we could obviously do more than just lowering subsidies, I'm not saying we should ignore externalities or that we should just completely abandon all subsidies entirely. But I am saying we shouldn't pretend that meat actually costs what we see in the store. Meat is cheap because (for various reasons) as a society we've all collectively decided to spend tax money so that we can pretend that it costs very little to produce.