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Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

"Entitlements" is a strange word for this. The fact is, that farming dairy, cattle, and produce pays so little through the primary market that those people would starve if not for government subsidies. The people who literally prevent every other person on the continent from starving.

Farming is hard and pays little.

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"Entitlement" is a term of art [1] that means that the farmers are legally entitled to those benefits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

Doesn't mean it was not a bad choice of a word to represent the concept. Politicians who create and use these terms are doing it with intent, if it was up to them, they would indeed starve the farmers, you, me and everyone we know.

Or maybe the word was subverted after it was chosen to represent this concept? Not saying it was the case (I don't know) just mentioning the possibility.

Well if the subsidies stopped and some farmers quit, then the producers would have to pay more. And farmers would return. I don’t get this constant subsidies to farmers everywhere. We take your taxes and shove it to farmers so you can have cheap corn and get fat. Maybe if some products werent so heavily subsidiest farmers would other, better food.

Remember that these agricultural feedback cycles are not instant and demand for food is only flexible to a point (if people starving is not a viable option). Removing production capabilities quickly, even with price increases, does not make for fewer mouths to feed.

You can do it gradually. Just look at Netherlands and New Zealand

There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now suddenly one of the most important thing for your citizen has to be imported instead of being produced locally. This has lots of side effects and of course you are more at the mercy of international supply chain problems (COVID!) which cause shortage, high cost, etc. Running out of food is a really bad situation to be in. This isn't as easy as "supply and demand" to fix the market as other industries.

I'm more familiar with Philippines, but they turn out to have a very poor local farming industry. You go to the grocery store, majority is imported from abroad. We are talking of a country with 110M population. Makes food expensive, and lots of people are not exactly rich over there (on top of the issue of having country side people not having jobs)

You can't eat bank notes. Money can be stored, most foods spoil very quickly. This asymmetry results in inflation once your farms are gone. Just look at Zimbabwe.

So the obvious strategy is to support your farmers, help them get through the bad years and make sure there is always some slack. If you cut subsidies then the free market will trim agriculture for efficiency, meaning producing exactly enough food and not a single grain of wheat more. Any supply shocks will cause famine because there are no farmers overproducing beyond the need of what the market is willing to pay.

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