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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

Flip it around. Why is subsidizing corn a good thing?

I imagine if food production was not subsidized, much of it would naturally move to other countries with cheaper labour forces.

The USA doesn't want to be dependent on other countries for basic goods like food; imagine if there was an "OPEC" of food in 1973 and they decided to cut off the food supply to protest US support of Israel.

I'd rather tariff external corn than subsidize internal corn. That would mean we make enough to support ourselves but don't pay tax dollars to support someone selling their corn to other countries.

Most agriculture is not particularly labor-intensive now. We have robot tractors and ploughs and industrial scale feedlots and slaughterhouses. The average farmer cultivates over 300 acres, and that number is distorted downwards by large numbers of family farmers. Pure agribusiness can cultivate many square miles with basically no people.

The exception are soft fruits like strawberries, avocados, or apricots, where harvesting them mechanically will bruise them beyond what a consumer's willing to eat. These are luxuries, not staples, though. Things like wheat, corn, and other grains get harvested by giant machines and require little labor input.

It's still cheaper to export those machines to Brazil or something and have someone poorer drive the tractors and combine harvesters around and maintain them. No winter either so the utilization would be higher.

Not when you figure in transportation costs. Food is perishable, bulky, and labor-intensive to ship. Even with modern automated railroads and containerization (which aren't necessarily present in countries with cheaper labor), you can very easily spend more in transit than you do in growing & harvesting the food.

Sure, for labor-intensive crops, you might think that.

But the US doesn't subsidize labor-intensive crops.

It's better to produce too much food and keep it cheap than to risk a shortage and have people starve.

In nature nothing is ever produced in a vacuum. There is a bill to pay for overproducing and the effects are coming for us.

I know you are alluding to climate change, but paying money for security is perfectly fine.

The US produces far more corn than is needed for a secure supply of human food for the US population.

Or immigration.

It's great if you're trying to win a PR show against a cold war rival and bankrupt them. That was the original purpose of the USDA including roads, marketing, and subsidies.

These days its mostly because Iowa has an outsized role in our elections.

Not just PR. To have a stockpile of carbohydrates in case of Total War.

Besides the benefits to American agriculture and rural industry - cheap corn offers the world an environmentally better option compared to the alternatives of palm oil and other slash and burn crops.

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