|
Edited on Tue Dec-11-07 07:46 PM by app_farmer_rb
From later in the article:
"Whatever the supposed threat—the lack of food security, rural poverty, environmental stewardship—the world seems to have only one solution: government intervention. Most of the subsidies and trade barriers have come at a huge cost. The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that.
(snip)
Cutting rich-world subsidies and trade barriers would help taxpayers; it could revive the stalled Doha round of world trade talks, boosting the world economy; and, most important, it would directly help many of the world's poor. In terms of economic policy, it is hard to think of a greater good."
The Economist author(s) makes some good points about the inadequacies of CURRENT farm subsidies in the US (and to a lesser extent, Europe), but it's far too broad a brush to paint ANY possible farm subsidies as failures using the above examples.
Farmers grow food (and other ag. products) for revenue. Subsidizing individual ag. products probably does not make sense, short of any type of possible future mass-famine that requires grain production to rapidly step-up. I certainly agree that recent US farm policies have caused an over-production of corn & soy (resulting in obesity from HFCS {high fructose corn syrup}, CAFO's {Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: i.e.- factory animal farms}, pollution, erosion, etc.).
However, GOOD farmers do a lot more than grow & sell ag. products. They preserve open space, run hedgerows on their field borders (minimizing erosion and creating wildlife habitat), and grow cover-crops in the off-seasons (protecting & building soils, and also protecting water supplies). At present, these good farmers are adopting these practices primarily due to their own senses of stewardship and responsibility. I firmly believe that farmers need MORE subsidies to create further incentives supporting these practices.
The quote "Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that." Nonsense! As Wendell Berry has eloquently stated, we NEED more "eyes per acre," watching out for, and protecting the ecological processes that sustain both the farms themselves and the larger society around them. The problem is not with farm subsidies per se, but that US farm policy since World War 2 has been to drive farmers off land, and support corporate consolidation. Farming is applied ecology, and US farm policy of the last 50 years has supported a particularly ugly form of ecological totalitarianism (i.e.- mass monocropping, CAFO's, etc.).
The Doha-round, WTO-style ag. reforms proposed by the Economist are a recipe for further ecological and social disaster, in the industrialized and developing worlds alike.
-app
PS- the CRP program is one nice exception to the general trend of recent US farm policy. Although some critics harp on the "paying farmers to not grow food" angle, Nickb79's points upthread about its benefits are entirely true.
EDITED for clarity & grammar.
|