Comment by s_dev
2 years ago
I'd be in favour of removing meat subsidies. If the 'true' price of steak or a burger was ten times higher people would eat it for special occasions and not every day with every meal. It's telling and hypocritical how many meat eating 'libertarians' are in favour of government handouts to preserve their food eating habits rather than letting the market do it's work. I'm a meat eater but I'll concede that those subsidies would have to be slowly removed -- otherwise it would result in the collapse of certain industries.
Commercial fishing is just unsustainable. So unless you're a guy with a fishing rod we'll eventually have to just stop the boats heading out to sea.
Meat subsidies? There are programs to support smaller suppliers, increase competition. Not directly make beef cheaper.
It's something like a billion a year? Sounds like a lot; your part was $2.50 in taxes. Not very significant in a trillion-dollar budget.
Removing these programs would probably have the opposite effect: letting competition languish would leave one or two large players, who could set the prices anywhere they liked. Probably not lower.
The point of the comment wasn't the meat prices, but the preservation of the environment. Higher prices will mean less consumption which will mean less production so a environment win, and still room for a small but also expensive producer or two. Unless the duopoly will want higher production and decrease the prices so we will land in the same place, environment-wise. Or am I getting the subsidies point wrong?
I don't see how the money spent by the government to encourage competition (not strictly a 'subsidy' which means 'price support') has any effect on the environment.
I like the motivation, but I don't think it could work in practice. Government never seems to be able to effectively "crack down on commercial X but allow individual to do X". People are too crafty and corporations hire lots of lawyers. They will always find a way to follow the letter of the law and get around the spirit of the law. Suddenly, there's an army of "individuals with fishing rods that are totally not employees" who through a totally legit web of contractor relationships and transactions, all happen to deliver their fish to the commercial fish company for them to sell.
Gig fishing economy disruptors that is, all VC app-based.
What on earth does beef have to do with this? If anything, people eating more beef might consume less fish. Cattle populations are not collapsing.
>What on earth does beef have to do with this?
The topic here is eating habits that damage the environment.
I could have sworn it was about fish specifically.
Can you give an example of a 'meat subsidy'? I'm unaware of any.
Not GP, but US livestock subsidies total $50B since 1995: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestoc...
I found this a useful primer on the form that those subsidies take: https://farm.ewg.org/subsidyprimer.php
(edited to clarify US scope)
The primer mentions nothing about livestock
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy.
https://concito.dk/en/concito-bloggen/groen-reform-eus-landb... and https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-05/vcs-ms... , but I don't know much about it.
It’s been a while since I brushed up on that question, thank you for the impetus!
The EWG attempts to enumerate the federal subsidies, which, by its count, total some $50bn directly to livestock producers since 1995, plus $160bn to farms that produce mainly feedstock for the meat. [0]
To be fair, EWG’s count includes disaster assistance, COVID subsidies, and direct compensation for losses related to Trump’s trade war-all of which is consistent with what the feds provide for any industry.
But in agriculture particularly, in the US as in most territories, the stated rationale is to protect farmers. The idea being they can’t control the weather, but one bad year can wipe them out through no fault of their own. And these types of failure, from the vicissitudes of nature and of market conditions they couldn’t have foreseen, can be coordinated across a region or market in a way that makes it hard for conventional insurance to handle.
But they also don’t look at subsidy programs beyond those direct payments to meat and dairy producers; skilled (though motivated) observers seem to estimate that larger number at close to $36bn/yr in 2013 terms. [1]
To get to that larger number you’d probably include consumption-side subsidies like school lunch programs, marketing support, and backstopping private crop insurance; and you’d include the major crops like corn and soy that, while not directly bound for the supermarket shelf, will end up feeding humans as well as livestock in some form. Or as ethanol shrug. The kinds of subsidies that the EWG counted toward the 160bn-since-1995 in [0].
Their broader point though was that the latter type of subsidies aren’t subsidizing things you or I would call a fruit or a vegetable and buy at the grocer and eat directly (those are <1% of federal subsidies); instead they’re subsidizing inputs to livestock and processed food producers.
[0] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestoc...
[1] https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/news/removing-meat-subsidy-our...
Fair enough... but its not like these numbers are actually that clear.
The EWG say:
> The Department of Agriculture has spent almost $50 billion in subsidies for livestock operators since 1995, according to an EWG analysis.
Analysis is akin to interpretation... and we can read that their mission is an environmental one:
> Since 1993, the Environmental Working Group has shined a spotlight on outdated legislation, harmful agricultural practices and industry loopholes that pose a risk to our health and the health of our environment.
So their analysis would say livestock is over-subsidised, as that is aligned their mission. It doesn't mean that my analysis would be in agreement with theirs.
I also looked at one of pdfs they link to:
https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/AMS%20Pur...
I would need to go through all these numbers, check the sources, check how each was subsidised, work out what counts as "livestock" - eg is butter purchasing livestock, is bison, is farmed fish, etc. A long boring thankless task.