Re:Why the Evidence of Water on the Moon is Bad News
by eru on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @07:20AM
(#852202)
I don't think the European farmers will get unemployed. They will have to adapt e.g. to higher quality. Organic stuff seems to be all the rage.
The farmers of New Zealand adapted, too.
Re:Why the Evidence of Water on the Moon is Bad News
by wlievens on Thursday October 01, 2009 @04:56AM
(#854557)
Most people will still want to buy cheap food. I buy organic from local quality farmers when possible, but it's just not always practical and economical. So if we massively import cheap food, we will lose a lot (most?) of the agricultural jobs in Europe and that's not politically tenable.
The other argument I've heard against abolishing food subsidies is a strategic one. We'd become dependent on food from countries that are often not politically stable. An oil crisis on the food level could be devastating.
I say, if that's the argument, then be honest about it and nationalize agriculture instead of pretending it's private businesses.
Absolutely We spend a lot of money on aid, and then spend orders of magnitude more to chancel that aid by killing the market for third world products. But fixing that problem will require us to make thousands of farmers unemployed, and that's political suicide. Especially in Europe, where agriculture subsidies are strongly supported by the political mainstream.