The nature of unnatural farming...
Aug. 29th, 2003 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearA chap reflecting on a 60 minutes thing about government subsidies in farming forgot about something significant : Profit
The people that get the government to pay the "don't grow this" subsidies to small farmers are the same ones who went into agro-business. They're the same ones that bought out thousands of small farmers and consolidated their land holdings into super-farms. They're in it for the money, and measure everything on cost v. income terms just like any other business. They're not real "farmers". The few "real" farmers that work for them have income, but not the traditional property they used to have.
Businesses work on managing supply and demand curves. Yes, world hunger (or even american hunger) is a sign that there's more demand, but as far as business is concerned, demand that can't afford to pay for the supply, at whatever price, isn't "demand" and doesn't even show up in the curves. (as a parallel, that's the reason companies worried about software or music pirates that wouldn't pay for it if that was the only alternative aren't even acknowledged as an entity).
If all the land in America that's farming-capable was re-activated, two things would happen.
1) we'd risk over-cultivating the land and create the potential for the 1930s dustbowl.
2) the price of commodities would drop so low that NOBODY would make any money off of it, and in fact the mega-farms would lose significantly. those megafarms going broke would have an incredible negative impact on the food supply. and also would seriously risk the shipping industry that gets our food to us, since they would be without work (and money) until something came along to recover the megafarms or re-split them up into mini-farms again; that's likely a 2-year process at minimum (and few could really afford it), all the while there would be no food being grown.
its a BIG thing. we've created a balance that gives us room to expand if necessary, but otherwise needs to be held in the stasis we've had it in for the last 50 years. disrupting the stasis would be devestating to the food supply and the rest of the economy...
The people that get the government to pay the "don't grow this" subsidies to small farmers are the same ones who went into agro-business. They're the same ones that bought out thousands of small farmers and consolidated their land holdings into super-farms. They're in it for the money, and measure everything on cost v. income terms just like any other business. They're not real "farmers". The few "real" farmers that work for them have income, but not the traditional property they used to have.
Businesses work on managing supply and demand curves. Yes, world hunger (or even american hunger) is a sign that there's more demand, but as far as business is concerned, demand that can't afford to pay for the supply, at whatever price, isn't "demand" and doesn't even show up in the curves. (as a parallel, that's the reason companies worried about software or music pirates that wouldn't pay for it if that was the only alternative aren't even acknowledged as an entity).
If all the land in America that's farming-capable was re-activated, two things would happen.
1) we'd risk over-cultivating the land and create the potential for the 1930s dustbowl.
2) the price of commodities would drop so low that NOBODY would make any money off of it, and in fact the mega-farms would lose significantly. those megafarms going broke would have an incredible negative impact on the food supply. and also would seriously risk the shipping industry that gets our food to us, since they would be without work (and money) until something came along to recover the megafarms or re-split them up into mini-farms again; that's likely a 2-year process at minimum (and few could really afford it), all the while there would be no food being grown.
its a BIG thing. we've created a balance that gives us room to expand if necessary, but otherwise needs to be held in the stasis we've had it in for the last 50 years. disrupting the stasis would be devestating to the food supply and the rest of the economy...
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-29 12:36 pm (UTC)