Asymmetrical Information

So are you accounting for the study by economists (highlighted, I believe, in The Economist) revealing that because poor countries import a greater value in agricultural products than they export, abolishing trade subsidies might actually hurt, on balance, poor nations? For me, that's the only fly in this potentially great ointment.

Thom York is a genius.

Abolishing export subsidies may indeed hurt third \/\/orld nations -- in the aggregate. The key is that the primary beneficiaries of the subsidies are the relatively \/\/ealthy city-d\/\/ellers, and the losers are the truly impoverished inhabitants of rural areas.

(Nice that the filter is letting through \/\/ in place of double-U )

UUoUU, just UUoUU.

I never thought I'd see the day that celebrities UUould support a cause the UUasn't counter productive.

"I have dreams of Tim Robbins on fire"

Susan Sarandon and Tim live about a block and a half from me. One day a couple years ago +hen they +ere at the height of their anti-+ar contentiousness there +as a big **BANG** in the street and a car right in front of Susan's house exploded into flames.

I thought the Pentagon had sent a smart bomb to take them out. But it +as only a manhole explosion.

A+, +e didn't _really_ +ant to see Tim in flames.

I dream of Tim Robbins AND Susan Sarandon on fire.

And they run down the street and Oliver Stone and Sean Penn try to help them, and they wind up burning up, too.

Imagine getting rid of four pieces of shit in one fell swoop.

"How I dream, how I dream..."

"Oxfam, however, says the impact of subsidy reduction on consumer prices would be miniscule." Coming from an advocacy group made up of people who think the 9% of income that Americans spend on food is a bad thing, it's not too hard to fill in the blanks on the rest of the argument. So what if you're below the poverty line in America? Take one for the Third World.

Given that the President has signaled the end of his support for the next Farm Bill, we are talking about the end of subsidies as we know them anyway. Just a few questions before we bury the concept, if you don't mind.

Are any of the critics of subsidies old enough to remember the 1930's or know someone old enough to describe what wide spread hunger was like in the U.S.? Are they aware of what it was like before hybrid seed corn quadrupled yields? Do they realize the inherent risk in assuming that farm production is a given - especially since we have not had a significant drought or a visit from a pest like the corn borer in over a quarter century?

Are they aware that the trade in beef cattle between Canada and the U.S. has been suspended for two years due to Mad Cow worries? Do they know what soybean rust is? Please, getting advice from celebrities regarding agriculture makes listening to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon rant on war policy sound like a debate between distinguished historians.

Granted, free trade on steel, stereos, oil, even cotton is a good thing. However, the day you equate it to the risks in supplying your meat and potatoes, you are asking for uncertainty that makes the stock market look like a sure thing.

If you dare, ask youself a couple of questions. If you had to, do you have the gardening skills to feed yourself? Do you even have a place to do so without stealing from the next guy?

Take the time to understand the fragility of the food supply you take for granted. If you live long enough, it might come in handy.

Gary: My dad tells stories about sneaking up on a woodchuck or rabbit with a rock to put meat on the table in the 30's. Still, he got enough food (mostly vegetables from the garden, I suppose) to grow up 6 foot tall and very strong. AFAIK, there hasn't been an actual shortage of food production in this country since the Pilgrim's first year or two. Economic conditions have often kept some people from getting their share - e.g., poor whites in the antebellum South eating clay in the midst of huge plantations - but that isn't much of a factor anymore. Welfare works quite well enough to feed and (usually) house anyone whose first priority is food and housing.

Yes, you can find families with hungry children, but if you take a close look I guarantee you'll find one or more of the following conditions:

1. Much of the family money diverted to drugs (including cigarettes and booze).

2. Nobody bothers to cook. TV dinners, restaurants, and other ready to eat options all cost several times as much as basic cooked meals, and are less healthy.

3. $150 shoes on the kids, bling-bling on the parents.

4. A TV in every room and the cable bill paid before anything else...

Also, prices at the farm have damned little to do with store prices anymore. When my father raised cherries, the markup on fresh cherries between the farm and a supermarket just 5 miles away was around 400%. Wheat makes up only a few percent of the cost of bread. A few years ago, hog prices plummeted until hogs cost less than the food to raise them, but pork prices in the supermarket were high.

I do agree that the food supply is precarious in one respect: it depends greatly upon shipping food over long distances. Block the main roads into any large city, and I think the stores would be empty in two or three days. I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think six truck bombs or fewer could accomplish this in any city - and in places like NYC just the threat of truck bombs on the bridges and in the tunnels would probably cause the authorities to effectively choke off food shipments while they inspected all the trucks...

OTOH, I live out in the country. I wouldn't like to have to raise my own garden, but I know how and have everything needed except seed. If we had to live only on what's stored in the basement, it would get monotonous after a while, but there's at least six months worth of food down there. There's a potato farm and a beef ranch within a few miles. I might have to go a few miles further for apples. Of course the real problem if something went haywire in the food supply wouldn't be feeding ourselves - it's whether we'd feed desperate refugees from Detroit or shoot them...

Too right, John.
Reagan. Schwartzenegger.

Gary, those are reasonable points, but given how much food we already import from Canada, Mexico, and South America, I fail to see the actual problem. In depression days, as with most famines, the problems tended to revolve around absolute poverty (we have complex welfare programs now) and distribution (again, not so much an issue). Even to get food from the third world.

The argument is not that prices would make a big jump if we were more dependent on third-world agriculture, but that artificial price deflation caused by local price subsidies makes it impossible for those third-world agricultural industries to start in the first place: they have no profitable export markets. Moreover, given the increasingly stressed water supplies in portions of the Western US, greater reliance on imported food may even turn out to be the long-term survival option.

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