Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.
You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.
The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.
Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.
It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.
Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.
What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.
And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.
Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.
To:
No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.
> take what little profit there is
Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.
> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people
If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.
Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.
This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.
This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it worked both times.
Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!
Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.
In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.
> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.
Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.
Not really? It is very protective to maintain an agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so is immensely risky.
Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with food, or munitions.
You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary concern of a nation state and is worth economic inefficiency.
With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from Brazil and risk famines.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.