> Farmers can’t produce milk and cheese at the low prices American consumers have grown accustomed to without some effect on water, says [an industry mouthpiece]. “The alternative here,” he says, “is a society that depends upon other countries to feed us.”
What a crock of bullshit, if I may say so. US has a surplus of agricultural products and is a massive exporter to the point where it perturbs world markets, some 140 billions per year. This is true for many advanced economies that subsidize agriculture in various ways to protect food security and rural employment, for example the EU, and is frequently contested by poor economies dependent on cash crop exports to finance healthcare, etc.
The typical reaction of any industry when an ecologic issue is reported is to ignore it, then deny it, then lobby forcefully that tying to fix it will destroy the national economy. And then they grudgingly comply and there is no economic catastrophe.
My understanding is that there is an oversupply of Dairy in the country right now due to reduced demands for things like Milk and American cheese. The stockpile of American Cheese is at an all-time high and they're converting to this cheese to get their surplus into a more long-term store of value. Not sure why we would continue to subsidize this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/ameri...
We subsidize foods because most of the people in our government have read their histories, and know that instability in food pricing and availability is a great way to bring about a domestic regime change.
> From a realpolitik perspective encouraging the vast overproduction of food is probably one of the smartest things our government has done
Not if you're in for the long haul. Dumping excess ag products and clothing on Africa has trashed the local economies beyond repair, made the countries depend on "foreign aid" and now China comes in and binds the countries to them by rebuilding all the infrastructure... with the dollars they gained from exporting to the US.
Unless the poison is immediately making you sick, and you can't afford to drink clean water, people don't get mad enough to riot.
Ape brains are really bad at holding other apes accountable for long-term, distributed harm inflicted on them.
Brown water coming out of the tap? You'll have marches in the streets. A slow poison that will, over five years of exposure drop the IQ of your children by 20 points? After four years of litigation hell and much hand-wringing, someone might finally get around to making your water mostly OK. [1]
> Unless the poison is immediately making you sick, and you can't afford to drink clean water, people don't get mad enough to riot.
Flint still has lead in the water. In Western societies riots have become really rare except France (which except for the Nordic states properly investing their oil money)... which coincides that they're the only remaining Western world with a halfway decent social security network. Macron tried to dismantle it and follow Germany and UK neoliberalism... had to roll back quite a bunch and people still want his head (some literally brought guillotines!).
French people actually can and dare to stand up for themselves. Their methods aren't exactly conventional, but they are effective.
There's a huge difference between subsidizing stability of staple crops and continuing to subsidize beyond sustainable levels or because of a lobby.
Clearly it is in the national interest to ensure we can produce certain kinds of goods, however government does not really adapt to the market or changing tastes so they end up causing asymmetries. You could likely dial-down these subsidies a significant amount and still be just fine from a production perspective.
Even if you wanted to destabilize global markets by domestic subsidies to create leverage, we're still WAY beyond that level which is a bit crazy. Anecdotal? I dunno - I would point to the current Soybean prices after losing one importer (China) and the fact that we basically are incentivized to dump wheat and corn on countries for aid to prop up prices.
> There's a huge difference between subsidizing stability of staple crops and continuing to subsidize beyond sustainable levels or because of a lobby.
There is, just like every company has 20% of its workforce that can safely be fired, with zero, or positive impact on overall performance.
The problem is that nobody can reliably identify who that 20% is.
It's much the same with agriculture subsidies. Your system can either be efficient, or it can be resilient. The US Federal government - just like the government of every other developed country in the world - wants to err strongly on the side of resilience.
Maybe I read this differently than siblings did, but ISTM this means that domestic regime change frequencies are way too low. We need a few more wheat panics and milk shortages to produce the optimum level of domestic regime change!
Which gives me some optimism. Things are quite bad in the US right now for people in the bottom 3 quintiles (compared to where we would be if it hadn't been for vulture capitalism which started in the early 80s).
I remember when they weren't as bad as today. In the early 80s the debt was a paltry $3 billion and minimum wage had a buying power equivalent to perhaps $15-20 per hour today in rural America.
Where I live, republicans are in charge of farming, but the political split is about 30% left-leaning. We're unlikely to see a significant increase in food prices even with inflation. But I feel that republican politicians have broken the social contract of providing basic needs and good-paying jobs for their constituents. And democratic politicians have largely abandoned their base (which used to be labor).
Gasoline costs perhaps 1/4 of what it would if externalities were included (like in Europe). Same with foods like meat, dairy or anything else that becomes environmentally unfriendly under factory farming. This is all by design to keep the masses satiated. It's cheap so it can't be disrupted.
Here's a way that I think about it. We produce enough food to be toxic at the level that it is being consumed, by any reasonable definition of toxic. We produce so much that we have to chemically modify it, and then engage in psychological warfare, to force people to consume it.
What a crock of bullshit, if I may say so. US has a surplus of agricultural products and is a massive exporter to the point where it perturbs world markets, some 140 billions per year. This is true for many advanced economies that subsidize agriculture in various ways to protect food security and rural employment, for example the EU, and is frequently contested by poor economies dependent on cash crop exports to finance healthcare, etc.
The typical reaction of any industry when an ecologic issue is reported is to ignore it, then deny it, then lobby forcefully that tying to fix it will destroy the national economy. And then they grudgingly comply and there is no economic catastrophe.