US produces enough raw food to satiate 10 billion people. The cost is not the issue
'make people not starve' is a laudable _goal_. It's a state of the work we want to reach. 'Subsidize corn farming' is a _policy_, it's an intervention that has all sorts of intended and unintended effects on the state of the world. Under that policy, fewer people starve, but also there's more HFCS, some farmers make more money than the would, some make less in inequitable ways, etc.
Regardless, if one thinks a policy isn't doing a good job achieving its intended goal, one can't just suggest achieving the goal as an alternative. If it was trivially attainable, why do we have government intervention and policies in pursuit of it?
One has to articulate an alternative policy, or at least acknowledge that an alternative is necessary. Why, after all, is it the case that the US produces as much food as it does. Is it in spite of the prevailing farm policy?
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Food stamps are the best way to ensure people don't starve, not specific crop subsidies.
Yes it does. If people spend more money on food, food prices will go up, and more food will be grown.
I can't vouch for corn subsidies being the best way to lower prices, but it's certainly a powerful lever that decreases food prices across the board.
Trash food.
> Cheaper feed leads to cheaper meat.
Great, don't eat meat. It's incredibly expensive, and not just monetarily.
If we're facing a food shortage, corn seems like a really bad place to dump money.
This is why meat is expensive and why people in less developed countries can't afford as much meat as Americans.
But I also imagine it can't be cheaper to buy X food and feed it to chicken to then eat the chicken compared to just eating X food.
> US produces enough raw food to satiate 10 billion people.
I'm skeptical of that claim. Source?
“Overall production of corn in the U.S. was 15.1 billion bushels for 2021“ * 56 lb per Bushel / 10 billion people = 84.6 lb of corn per person is about 23% of the minimum calories needed per year. But corn is about 37% of all crop land.
Fishing, cattle on grassland, and hunting etc might bump that a little, but ~5 billion seems like a better theoretical estimate and presumably lower in practice.
I don’t have the domain knowledge to know if this is or isn’t the reality of any actual subsidy that really exists, all I can say is that the argument seems plausible.
(Driving prices down is making food a smaller percentage of the economy, making it more affordable directly to people in poverty and easier to support food programs from charity/tax.)
Just reserves lead to speculation dynamics in shortages. There is always an expectation of the reserve running out and panics turn it self-fuffilling as infamously demonstrated by supply chain issues or possibility of snowfall. Increased production kills the expected future price.
In the Irish case, the subsistence farmers would have been devastated by a US overproduction even before a famine, similar to subsistence farmers in Africa and India today.
Holodomor includes perpetual mismanagement and a political decision not to accept food help or really do anything. No amount of overproduction before Stalin would have prevented food being seized and then rotting in transit.
Certainly it's the case that you need at least enough overproduction to drive prices down marginally and to restock a reserve if it is actually used, and make speculation not a sure bet.. I think current subsidies go beyond that and arguably don't work because all that overproduction drove innovations in making food fungible to energy (i.e. as ethenol) and energy is now a more retainable wealth as the major input to proof of work.