Comment by deepsun
1 day ago
Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
1 day ago
Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
Name one country which is fully self-sustaining.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
France, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
5 replies →
1. That's almost 20 years old data. 2. That's just calories.
Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.
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> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.
Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.
You want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
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It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.