I don't know whether there's really a shortage, but American rice farmers have been struggling for a while. Washington refuses to let them trade with their biggest potential foreign customer, Cuba, and the subsidies to not farm haven't kept up enough to offset the artificially reduced demand. Combine that with the fact that some rice is going into animal feed to replace the corn that we're burning in our cars, and you have the elements of a shortage (at least a minor one).
well considering America is pretty much the fattest country in the world,food rationing isn't really that bad of an idea...
farming subsidies, their distortion on market prices, and the subsequent inability of poor countries to obtain cheap food, is a grave problem and should be getting more attention than it has been. the short-sightedness of protectionist measures never cease to amaze me.
They make it so that non-US producers can't compete cost effectively. Outside the US the subsidies drive you out of business, and so the total available supply is smaller. This smaller supply pool means that scarcity drives the prices back up. This is the same effect as when the Government pays producers not to produce. So in the end you get a negligible gain on price, but much smaller supply. That is the problem.
Seriously... I'm tired of helping other countries already. Foreign aid is lame, unless it's after World War II.
I just ordered three Thai entrees at $7 each and got 6 boxes of rice with it...and I'll throw that away bc I prefer brown rice. Ok, I feel a little bad about that.
There are some problems with this view. Note that my post was responding to one that seemed to suggest that US farm subsidies exacerbate high world food prices, so that's the claim I'm addressing, not whether farm subsidies are good or bad overall. The way that US farm subsidies drive some farmers in other countries out of business is by allowing US farmers to sell at a lower price, which lowers the world price of food. Those farmers in the rest of the world who cannot compete with the new, lower world price will go out of business, or, more accurately, will no longer affect the market. Their contribution to supply will still be there in the long run should prices go back up enough for them to re-enter the market, but they simply aren't selling. So foreign countries will have a decrease in the quantity supplied (the amount that's actually sold) of domestic agricultural goods, not an actual decrease in supply. The possible qualification to this is the possibility that a large firm, which would be able to sell a certain amount of food at the new, lower world price, might go out of business when it lost a portion of its sales to the decrease in price. In the case of food, however, the firm would be much more likely to just produce less food (again, all of this lost production would be more than replaced by imports from the US), since agriculture generally is not too reliant on economies of scale. This post has been a lot denser than I intended, but suffice it to say that the effect of US farm subsidies is to simply to increase world supply. It is extremely unlikely that these subsidies are contributing to higher food prices anywhere.
Personally, I agree, but I don't think this would be a popular opinion around here. Foreign aid by government encourages civil war and despotism, and increases poverty. The progressives won't read this because it's from Cato, but it tells the mixed results of aid to Uganda, where foreign aid is 50% of the GDP: http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb88.pdf Another, more general article: http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=7951
Haiti's natural environment/ecology has been obliterated by despots. Ergo I'd say it's a bad example as far as food problems. Just soil erosion from deforestation has made the land almost useless - nevermind drought...
i didn't mean to suggest that farm subsidies spike world prices. in my attempt to make a pithy remark i failed to expound on the reasoning behind my conclusion. while subsidies have not been the sole cause of this food crisis (surging demand in china and india may be bigger culprits), their distortion of the market has certainly been a huge factor. like ottamaton said, by artificially DEPRESSING prices, farm subsidies drive farmers in developing countries out of business and deprive poor countries of their comparative advantage. i think the notion that foreign countries do not have a decrease in supply, only a decrease in quantity supplied, is flawed since traditional economic theory does not apply as easily to poor developing countries. when those farmers go out of business, they cannot respond quickly to an increase in food prices and simply re-enter the market. while you are right that in the long-run, supply will match increased demand, in the short-run these farmers are unable to afford re-entry, especially at a time when prices are high. this short-term decrease in supply deprives locals of accessible food, leading to heavier reliance on imports, preventing the achievement of self-sufficiency, and consigning poor countries to poverty. the effect of farm subsidies has been to depress world prices for the past 30 years, presumably making food cheaper for all. but the result is now that a surge in demand has occurred (from the aforementioned boom in countries like china), the short-term unavailability of farming in poor countries is making the food squeeze seem even tighter than it would be had poor countries been able to afford their own farms. throw in the distorting effect subsidies for ethanol and other biofuels have on crop prices and you get high crop prices that poor countries can't capitalize on. the food crisis we are seeing now is, in my opinion, the result of short-term responses (or rather the short-term inability to respond) of developing countries but is potentially a long-term problem that cannot be left untended to in the hope that market forces will restore supply in time to feed the starving masses.
I'm tired of having hungry people shoved down my throat. Stop talking about it. It's annoying. What hungry people? I'm not hungry. Out of sight out of mind.
