Farm Subsidies Debate

Guess why there are farm subsidies?

Wat?Are you arguing for unpaid/reverse paid internships here?Look, people need to eat. There will always be a need for farmers. We're literally suffering from success. As far back as the 30s we were paying farmers to dump or destroy their produce to prevent racing to the bottom. The supreme court declared that was unconstitutional so they ended up just doing a ton of subsidies instead. We don't want farming to be maximally price efficient. A surplus of food is a good th

Not everyone is a farmer. And we subsidize them too.

This is by design, you don't want your farms to underproduce for even a single season. Subsidizing them is worth it. However, we can always talk about whether the current subsidy structure is good for us. I don't think USA's obsession with corn is healthy.

Might be corn subsidies in the US.

You have to understand with the big agriculture companies control the prices of seed, fertiliser and food, farmers hardly made any money. Normally government would distribute money to farmers (like in Europe) or farmers make high value product such as cereals and so on. It is like the battle between small shops and supermarket, big guys always win.

There are huge non-livestock farming subsidies as well, both in the US and in the EU. Farming is not directly driven by supply, demand and price the people are willing to pay (because without food people riot).

It's affected by what foods get agricultural subsidies and which ones don't.

Unless it's farm subsidies.

Well, in EU the farmers get subsidies. I believe the thinking is that food is too important to let it be optimized by the markets.