Note: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.
Democracies with lots of farmland, i.e. ones with reduced food security risk, have farm subsidies because they have lots of voting farmers.
The thing about farms is that you can't just start producing stuff right away. It takes months to actually grow out a crop, you need a seed stock ready, and you just can't deal with sudden shocks.
So you have to be always prepared because if you're not, even just for a few years, it can bite you in the ass.
Periodic stability mechanisms, yes. But that is the vast minority of farm subsidies.
And the whole amount of farm subsidies that go to alfalfa and cotton and tobacco fail to rise to this argument. Farm subsidies are about buying off a voting bloc. (Disclaimer: I own farmland as an investment.)
They're arguing that the idea isn't categorically absurd.
That said, they’re political gold and so very reliable. Hence why I own farmland. (It doesn’t grow anything.)
Thats the national security issue.
I think the CCP considers securing pork from price shocks to be of vital national importance. It's part of the implicit bargain they've made with the population.
The hypothetical where a geopolitical rival has the capacity to shut down shipping across the entirety of the Atlantic and the Pacific isn't something that will enter the realm of plausibility within the next 5 years or so. 5 years is plenty of time to spin up farms.
That's also ignoring the fact that whether we'd even need to spin up farms in a world without subsidies is an open question.
You're right that imports would make up the difference, but that's where national security comes in. If you rely on importing your food and your trading partners become adversaries or shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.
We are net exporters of all the major staples. At the very least, we can ratchet down subsidies until we are no longer a net exporter of agricultural products; that level of production is sufficient to handle all our essentials.
> If you rely on importing your food and shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.
The biggest exporters of agricultural products to the United States are Mexico and Canada, which also have plenty of excess capacity. Even in the unlikely scenario that some geopolitical rival manages to shut down trade across the Pacific and the Atlantic, we wouldn't be in a place where we have to worry about our food. If somehow our rival also had the capacity to shut down transit of goods across our land borders, they also have the capacity to shut down domestic transit of goods. I.e., even having self sufficiency based on farms in Iowa wouldn't help feed anyone on the coasts.
lol not if a world war happens buddy. regardless of whether we export staples or not (and we eat more than staples), staples taste horrible without spices, which we import at net 60%, and we need more of everything when we're defending liberal values from being wiped off the earth.
Even if we took that argument as compelling, it doesn't explain why we should subsidize wheat and corn instead of said exotic spices.
boo hoo. I never set the first goal posts, nor the second that you imply. They're all only components of maintaining quality of life for our constituents and fellow citizens in a probability distribution of predictable things, including so-called 'black swan' events.
The risk of ending wheat/corn subsidies is so much higher than having them in the first place...
Overfarming, exports and food waste are just side effects of this mechanism.
That's not to say our subsidies are targeted well. Not only do we have surplus to export, we have surplus to cram into our own mouths, causing an obesity crisis. We'd be well advised to tune the subsidies to healthier foods. We would still have a wide surplus against a crisis, while eating better.
But unfortunately, long-term dependence on subsidies and some historical accidents of politics have given the existing beneficiaries a very heavy thumb on the scale of decision-making in agricultural policy.
It's not that different: "news subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't agree on what's happening cannot agree on what to do, therefore it's completely vulnerable..."