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nitrogen | 3 years ago

Consider this scenario:

1. The US drops all agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

3. "Elsewhere" goes to war with a US ally and stops selling food to the US.

4. The US then wishes it hadn't given up its abilty to grow food.

discuss

bombcar|3 years ago

The amount of “the worlds economy is so interdependent that no country would go to war” argumentation seems to have died somehow.

Also I don’t know how “we will get food from even further away rural communities argues against food coming from rural communities”.

TulliusCicero|3 years ago

> 2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere

Gonna stop you there. This wouldn't happen, because the US has plenty of growing acreage and plenty of demand. The farming industry doesn't need subsidies, and removing them would affect total output only slightly on average.

Now, if we were more like Japan and had issues with enough space for farming, then yeah I'd agree with you.

ungamedplayer|3 years ago

Unless medium to large scale farming in the US is significantly different than the rest of the world, Land availability and demand are only tiny parts of the puzzle and not even the hardest issues to solve when farming. The need for immediate scale for any kind of shortage is guaranteed to cause significant shortages + massive price hikes starvation in the short term.

justin66|3 years ago

> 2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

I'd argue that the more plausible outcome is what economists predict: US agricultural interests would have to compete and domestic prices for food would go down, while the price that struggling economies which export food can charge for that food would go up. Competition... and the various parties involved focusing on what they're good at producing.

On the other hand, we in the US do tend to be pretty idiotic about largely abandoning business sectors when the going gets rough.

kevin_thibedeau|3 years ago

The prime growing areas will just move north where there is already plenty of rural land not being used.