You could also just have large import tariffs on food.

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.

While you guys throw tariffs on food here and cut subsidies are any of you aware that for some 10% of American's having food on the table is not a given?

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.

That is due to extreme levels of inequality in the US and one of the stingiest welfare systems in the whole developed world. It is not due to food prices. If that was the deciding factor then Norwegians and Japanese would be starving.

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.

Japanese people are maybe not starving, but because of high COL cause by tariffs a few years ago Taiwan became a richer country by PPP per capita.

> While you guys throw tariffs on food here and cut subsidies are any of you aware that for some 10% of American's having food on the table is not a given?

So let's funnel that 25% import tarif or money we save from not subsidizing the meat industry into the federal food stamps program.

You're missing the part where those government subsidies are being issued to growers who provide products certified for the SNAP and WIC programs. You remove the subsidies and mess with the tariffs too much and now you're into a whole other problem of growers now refusing to participate in either program.

Why would a grower refuse to participate in either program? They wouldn't get the option to not not-get subsidies. Their incentive to participate in getting their products certified for SNAP and WIC is that their costs are now higher so they have to raise their prices, and so then it'd be more important for them to get their products certified so that SNAP and WIC recipients can purchase them (thus expanding/retaining their customer base).

I'm skeptical about tariffs and I'm not necessarily opposed to subsidies (although I do kind of question whether they are actually an efficient way to help income-challenged Americans) -- but we could still distribute those subsidies differently in order to cheapen healthier food that's in our better interest to encourage. We could also, if we're getting rid of subsidies, consider giving income-challenged people money directly, which may or may not be comparatively cost-effective to working directly with the industry.

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.

Aren't we talking mainly about meat subsidise and not food in general?

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.

If you remove subsidies you got more money to spare for other things. As a general rule, and policy affecting consumer prices should look at its effect on consumers and combine such changes with other measures.

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.

Thank you for pointing this out.

The moment I see any mention of price increase to curb spending is probably as naive as it is dangerous.

It is not naive. What is naive is to leave to market to its own devices and assume everything will work themselves out beautifully.

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.

I think the game is that you also want to convince countries to not do that to US exports

Same reason everything else that is imported is imported - comparative advantage.

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...

We import those products like garlic and broccoli from China as part of a trade deal where they import corn and other grains even though they can and do produce their own. They have many more mouths to feed, so on their end, getting all of this extra grain in exchange for shipping over a select variety of vegetables and fish is a net plus to them, and to us, it provides an established return on government provided grain subsidies that allow them to issue more grain subsidies.

Tariffs are a much worse idea than direct subsidies to farmers. If you want people to buy American garlic, pay US farmers to sell it for cheaper than the Chinese garlic. A tariff is a regressive tax that makes life harder for the poor.

Where do you think money for subsidies come from?

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.

You assume the us needs to export food outside of North America.

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.

Because we’ve tried import tariffs before and they don’t work well?

Tariffs are complicated as fuck. Trump tried to half-ass it off the cuff and fucked up a lot of industries.

People import and export the weirdest shit with China. Even a small adjustment on tariffs might cause unseen ripple effect on businesses.

Taking your argument at face value and assuming you're right, I still want to point out that those subsidies are applied primarily to a subset of foods, especially feed crops for animals.

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.

From a strategic perspective grain is the most important thing in a food shortage. People can live a year or two without fruit or vegetables, but without the calories in grain things will get violent fast.

I'm not going to dismiss it outright, but I am mild-to-medium skeptical of this theory. Take a look at some of the recent years of subsidies listed on https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&yr.... It's not just that we prioritize feed crops more than oranges, we also prioritize feed crops more than potatoes and root vegetables. Our corn subsidies are on average over twice as high as our wheat subsidies, and over 7 times as high as rice subsidies.

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 strategic goal of having domestic food production and growing specific foods don't necessarily go hand in hand. While it makes a lot of sense to counter a famine with potatoes, in normal times you want to mostly produce what your population consumes. The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. The US produced 330 million tonnes of corn in 2009 [1] and just 55 million tons of wheat in 2012 [2] (that's the numbers I could easily find, and unfortunately they seem to use slightly different types of tons which differ by ~10%, metric system anyone?). Taking this into consideration, wheat subsidies are actually a bit higher per ton produced than corn subsidies.

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...

> The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher.

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.

I think you'll find it's largely due to historical precedent and lobbying.

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.

The UK quite correctly determined during WWII that to feed the population during a blockade, it was much more efficient to eat potatoes and peas and so on directly and make bread from wheat, than it was to feed livestock for meat and dairy.

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.

>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.

Your skepticism is warranted. After all, we had a highly researched government program about how to effectively tackle a worldwide pandemic, and... well.

> t's not just that we prioritize feed crops more than oranges, we also prioritize feed crops more than potatoes and root vegetables

Root vegetables don't have much calories. So this would actually make sense.

Root vegetables absolutely do have high calories.

People aren't going to live a year without fresh fruits without riots, but if you want a strategic reserve it should be potatoes.

Calories per acre.

"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-...

Some of the subsidies are entrenched and strongly lobbied. There is no reason at all to be wasting water on almonds or cotton in California, for an example.

The farming industry in California would be non-existent without constant subsidizing both of the crops and the extraordinarily wasteful and expensive importing of water from numerous other states to prevent the farmland that was originally desert from reverting back to it's natural state.

Importing of water from other states? Most of that is just diversion of naturally occurring water streams to where it’s needed.

“Importing” is an odd way to put it.

Meat subsidies in Germany are so successful at helping farmers compete with low cost countries that Germany is one of the biggest exporters of pork.

To be fair, Germany provides some really high-quality pork products to the world market in exchange for those subsidies.