Comment by europoorean
4 hours ago
> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a massive subsidy to enormous agribusiness operations. But yeah I’m sure some of the pork makes its way to some normal farmers too.
Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).
How common is farm landlords?
Depends on the area, but the vast majority are owner operated.
The question begs some other questions though.
One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?
>Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).
Why not both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive.
International markets and all that...
NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
Likely, and then... after Mexican farms went out of business, they added biofuels, the price spiked, and Mexico had no domestic corn people could buy.
It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent.
Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.
Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong.
The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
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