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Old MacDonald Has a Farm ... Subsidy
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12344 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1994 |
2,453 Words |
| Author
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Dennis T. Avery
Dennis T. Avery, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for
Global Food Issues, was the senior agricultural analyst for
the U.S. Department of State. His center is hosting the High-
Yield Declaration at www.highyinservation.org. |
America is writing another five-year farm bill that will probably keep paying farmers not to produce crops. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is looking at the need to double--and perhaps even triple--its farm output over the decades just ahead.
Why the disparity?
Farm policies in the United States and other First World countries try to give farmers more income from what they already produce. They are keyed to subsidies, not productivity. Most try to discourage more production, using quotas and cropland set-asides.
But the old farm subsidies are in trouble. They haven't stopped the decline in farm numbers, because the number and size of farms are really tied to the value of an off-farm job.
The subsidies date from an era when only a few people could afford to eat well. Americans were expected to eat meat; China would content itself with rice. Today, however, China's meat consumption is rising by millions of tons per year.
Another problem: The old farm subsidies were based on achieving national food self-sufficiency. They deliberately use farm trade barriers to prevent food imports. Thus, farm trade has expanded hardly at all since World War II, while nonfarm trade has expanded 14-fold.
Moreover, the world's good farmland is poorly distributed for future decades. The biggest food needs are in Asia, which will have nine times as many people per acre of farmland as North America
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