Farm Subsidies

[tippy]

Bill Moyers’ Journal on Farm Subsidies

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04112008/watch.html (Food bank shortages) (Expose on farm subsidies)

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04112008/watch2.html (Exposé on farm subsidies)

I watched this program last night. The first half of the program shows dwindling food supplies and empty storerooms of food banks against an increasing demand for food even among working families. The second half explores farm subsidies through Washington Post investigative journalists and how the system is fixed in a ridiculous manner providing $9 billion of taxpayer funds to often wealthy landowners. One example shows how 2/3 of Texas reaped ridiculous rewards from a drought relief bill during a non-drought period because of the space shuttle crash. Another showed a surgeon in Texas who owns land for which he receives a $500,000 payment. Can you imagine? A half a million dollars to one person, a surgeon who doesn’t farm? Some talks of reform were to cap subsidies at $250,000 payments and to not provide to people with income over $1,000,000. (Geez, you think?) One blogger had wished the program approached members of Congress to discover who supported reforms and who wouldn’t back new legislation. If I remember correctly it was stated that farmers along with pharmaceuticals were the two most powerful lobby groups in the nation.

[Gary Sisco]

Easy to imagine, Tippy, actually.

Harder to imagine but still true -- they almost always limit such tales to individual people -- is that agriculture in the US is now almost entirely industrialized and most of the subsidies go to huge corporations like Kraft and others. It's one of the most common forms of corporate welfare. Family farms have become so uncommon that farming and often agriculture itself is not included in employment-field dropdown questions on the internet. Check it out.

When I was coming up, a majority of Americans still lived not just rural but on farms. Today, simply not the case at all. It's reversed itself.

Last year's enormous and enormously stupid subsidies thrown at growing corn for biofuel is one the dumbest handouts, ever, billions of (borrowed with interest) dollars. They grew so much they didn't grow all kinds of other things, playing havoc with the food market as well as agricultural feed markets -- some feeds entirely disappeared last year -- they just weren't available.

This of course creates enormous demand. The US has been a net importer of food for some time, now. Supply and demand.

The idiot corn business isn't the causal factor in the increasing food cost but it is certainly *a* causal factor. And yet another reason that lends ample evidence to the dangers of electoral political interference with the economy. Every action creates its reaction and so forth and so on. Very often when people start up about having to "Do something!!" -- "Anything!" -- the ideas they come up with are dumber than not doing anything. If you're going to do something, do it mindfully, not mindlessly. But, no ...

I started noticing large food cost increases in our personal food buying last year and over the winter it's gotten more extreme. I couldn't believe my eyes a few months ago when rice -- rice from a bulk bin, no less -- was $1.98/lb. Rice makes the difference between hunger and not in most of the world. The price of chicken has risen as much as that of rice. We normally have fish and seafood as staples of the diet. Not anymore. We can't afford to buy even basic fish like haddock, so there's no fish or seafood in our diet at all, now. For protein, it's chicken, soy, or rice and beans, or nothing. If it keeps going the way it is, it will be rice and beans alone eventually. A good thing I like rice and beans and can eat it for months on end (and have).

[Gordon B]

Gary, you're right about the corn subsidies. Obama and Clinton are both supporters of the status quo, McCain is opposed to the subsidies. He's been on both sides of the issue in the past but has been consistently against the subsidies in this election cycle.

[tippy]

"King Corn."

Empty rice fields that could be planted to produce were emphasized in the program. I think the juxtaposition of the empty food banks against the investigation of farming subsidies was to show that resources could be shifted now from inappropriately (v. where appropriate) rewarding fallow farmers to production and feeding of increasing numbers of hungry people. The program also mentions how U.S. subsidies hurt developing world farmers who might otherwise have the opportunity to sell their food to the countries we are exporting our food to.

Fuel costs help explain current inflation on lots of things particularly transporting food do they not? I imagine perishable items requiring refrigeration in transport suffer even more for this.

[Gary Sisco]

Sure, they do, Tippy. No way they can't. But the corn subsidies were enormous and they have definitely been a causal factor, not only here but globally, in the food issues.

One of the most common crops of all, in the US, is, or rather was, sugar beets. They are used for all kinds of different things, foodwise, for both humans and farm animals. Beet pulp is a major dietary staple for horses -- whose diets can't be changed abruptly because very potentially lethal; they have a very delicate digestive system that can't deal with abrupt changes -- and disappeared from the market last year. They just didn't get planted because of the billions of dollars being thrown at corn. We had a real crisis, potentially lethal for our horses. The disappearance of beet pulp happened very suddenly. We even tried to get some shipped here from Canada and couldn't. We finally located a feed store 25 miles away that had thirteen bags, so we bought it all. It got us through the winter and we still have five bags left. Many people just had to do without along with their horses and hope for the best.

But hope and a metrocard get you a ride on the bus more often than not.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

Can you say communism?

Government meddling almost never ever makes things better.

[Uli]

can you say idiot?

[tippy]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Wozniak

Can you say communism?

Government meddling almost never ever makes things better.

Except communism’s got nothing to do with it. This is government meddling in a capitalist system where the top 1% have been sucking like vampires on the necks of working folk without even leaving enough for them to feed themselves. The shit’s hitting the fan for the greedy controllers at the top not because of the proletariat.

[Gary Sisco]

True enough. There's a longstanding "class war" in the US but only one of the classes is conscious of itself as a class. The very wealthy and powerful.

The US has long had socialism for the rich and powerful. It's the rest of us that are expected to get along as best we can off of our work.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

[QUOTE=tippy;740951This is government meddling in a capitalist system [/QUOTE]

I agree, and the government should NOT meddle, or you end up with farm subsidies. The next thing you know the government will be meddling and subsidizing the airline industry and even bail out some people who made poor judgement calls in getting mortgages on homes they couldn't afford in the first place with crazy variable interest rates that any thinking human being would have turned down.

Oh, wait...