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Comment by bweitzman | Hacker News Reader

The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?

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The New Zealand meat and dairy industries do not receive subsidies after radical market deregulation during the Labour government of '84.

We have a highly efficient and profitable sector, mainly for the reason that we compete in fairly extreme conditions against subsidised international players.

Note that this process incurred significant pain for many individuals while the industry reoriented and consolidated, and I am not inviting any argument around environmental impacts (which I would contend are bad, but also clearly less bad than other countries).

So yes, "natural" meat can be competitive and efficient without government subsidies.

All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.

Southland farmers themselves are saying that if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved.

The backlash even from the introduction of a heavy vehicles tax are representative of how much these farmers think they rely on the unpriced benefits they are getting.

> if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved

People always say things like this until they are forced to, and somehow find a way.

(Particularly if imports were charged similar tariffs)

> People always say things like this until they are forced to, and somehow find a way.

That is one of two possible outcomes. The other is that the sector just dies off and relocates to another place on earth, where externalities don't have to be considered, maybe for strategic reason. This has happened many times.

This is why the EU is looking into carbon-based tariffs.

If you want to enact global change, you can't just change yourself, though it's always a good place to start.

And probably a major beneficiary of similar laws currently is meat production and animal welfare laws used to exclude imports.

It’s time to subsidise NZ farmers to at least encourage sustainable land use.

Farming is thankless, backbreaking, poorly-paid work that often is only viable because of subsidies the government provides, because the government recognizes that without farmers we'll all starve. And you're concerned that they're not paying their fair share. Fine. Good luck with that.

> they're not paying their fair share

That's not how it works. There is no fair share. He is saying that farmers are not actually paying the costs they make society incur. Therefore these costs are not priced into the meat they produce which would not be that competitive if that was the case. It's a form of subsidy.

The cost of food as a share of income has fallen dramatically over the last fifty years or so. It's not unfathomable that it rises a bit again in exchange for properly pricing in externalities.

Demand for food is pretty inelastic.

If the external costs were included, consumer would simply be forced to pay for their consumption.

This would give a fair advantage for food that has less external costs.

External costs are also hard to estimate, especially if they is burdened on another species. How much is the suffering of a chicken worth?

and yet if you actually did that, people on the other side of the political spectrum would complain that it's unfair for poor people because they now have a higher food cost burden. Shouldn't the rich subsidize for the poor for these essentials?

So then you get back to the original condition - subsidizing food once again. In fact, this is the reason why they are subsidized in the first place!

No, if you implement a efficient system to transfer wealth, you don't subsidize meat as meat and plant based food are treated equally.

If a less lucky person (or what you call poor) receives money, they are still incentivized to spend the money efficiently. With the money they have available now, they can buy less meat but more plant based food than before.

We could for example lower taxes for those that earn least while increasing water and soil quality regulations (with matching tariffs for imports). This would increase food costs, which would hopefully match the money that people gained through lower taxes.

Meat would then become slightly more expensive than plant, but also have a major benefit for products that don't use a lot of water or harms the soil. Aquaculture would get a big boost, as would alternative method of meat production. The use of farm animals as an ecological alternative to using machinery to keep land clear of unwanted vegetation has become a niche method, and increased water and soil regulations would indirect benefit such farming alternatives.

> we'll all starve

Please, every time someone proposes farmers lead a less cushioned life we get these huge bitter fights from somewhere. They don't also have to exist here. If you have a vested interest and want your subsidies to continue, that's cool! But there's no need to peddle your salty response to it when literally everyone everywhere has already heard them said many, many times.

>less cushioned life

Jesus Christ... Come spend a week on my farm and see how cushy it is.

I grew up in the countryside. I'm sure your farm is very difficult to live on, but I'm not so sure it's a general thing.

Edit: Besides that, a subsidy is a cushion. That's what I was talking about. That doesn't merit this response.

> All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.

The net externality is probably positive, and if you want to start evening the slate using externalities then farmers would deserve a subsidy (which is bad policy).

Food is about as high on a supply chain as it is possible to get, and the entire downstream supply chain would count as an externality of the farmer's activity. If farmers didn't produce food we'd all starve to death, but that is absolutely not priced in to how much they get paid.

As I said, I really don’t want to get drawn into the environmental debate, but there is one persistent myth that does need to be corrected: the idea that emissions from “heavy” vehicles are not priced. They are. They’re in the ETS. Reductions in heavy vehicle use due to tax will not reduce carbon emissions at all, as it will be emitted elsewhere in the economy. The only way to reduce the emissions of an activity covered by the ETS is to lower the cap, which can be done without a vehicle tax of any kind.

A bit of googling says that New Zealand cows eat a lot of grain in both the beef and dairy industries. Grain is subsidized in many countries.

We'd probably have to define what "not receive subsidies" means.

I'm pretty sure they don't pay for the damages caused by the methane and N2O emissions caused by the meat production. "We don't have to care about our externalities" is ultimately a form of subsidy.

And the results shine! New Zealand has the world's highest feed efficiency in poultry.

https://www.feedstrategy.com/poultry/new-zealands-tegel-poul...

> The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?

Why would those subsidies matter when you're comparing a cow to a bioreactor? You can stick the cow in a dirty field and have hundreds of pounds of meat a few years later, as dirt-poor herdsmen with practically no captial have been doing for thousands of years. Its equivalent competitor would be a fussy bioreactor in a clean room that would require millions in capital, as well as high-end expertise and labor. Apparently the "food" is also ridiculously expensive.

Meat was a thing before government subsidies were a thing. Or before governments were a thing. Before most things were a thing, really.

yeah, before capitalism was a thing, before the current human population of the earth was a thing, really.

The scale is vastly different, is it not?

What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits despite subsidies) and that is not a vote winner.

> What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits) and that is not a vote winner.

But the context here is lab grown meat. If you removed all subsidies from traditional meat production, I really doubt meat would become more than ten times more expensive. From the OP:

> This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.

> That’s the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower.

It's worth noting that those numbers are estimates and the facility that is supposed to produce them hasn't been built to validate them.

Compare:

https://www.target.com/p/boneless-38-skinless-chicken-breast...

> Boneless & Skinless Chicken Breasts

> $1.99/lb

https://www.target.com/p/chicken-drumsticks-value-pack-4-28-...

> Chicken Drumsticks

> $1.29/lb

The country with the most expensive meat I know is Switzerland. The local chains Migros and Coop mostly sell meat produced in Switzerland. Here's the chicken you can usually find on the shelves in Migros:

https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-241001011000

> Whole chicken - $10/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/optigal-poulet-schenkel-241110100...

> Chicken drumsticks - $15/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/poulet-brustschnitzel

> Chicken breasts - $30/kg

https://produkte.migros.ch/bio-pouletbrust

> Chicken breasts (I suspect this is free range) - $58/kg

Ah yes, but how much would lab-grown meat produced in Switzerland cost?

Given that Switzerland has a world class chemical engineering and pharmaceutical industry and production facilities already, hypothetical lab-grown meat from Switzerland will probably among the cheaper high quality lab-grown meat in the world.

My understanding of Swiss manufacturing industry is high-end, complicated things. I agree it's likely that Swiss lab-made meat would be the cheapest in the world, but only by virtue of being the only place where it's feasible to make it.

Are the Swiss vegetarians, or do they just have a high median income? Coming from the US, those prices are unthinkable.

They have a high income and are really good at ignoring the poor who do the dirty, low paid jobs and at best eat mortadella/baloney, cheese and eggs (doing their part for the planet, unlike everyone else lmao). Just like other western EU countries, tbh.

Switzerland does have poor people. ~10% of the population below the poverty line which is defined around 2.2k CHF/month per person. This definitely doesn't allow for a lot of high quality meat consumption.

Sure, a few times per week, at a cost of spending quite some hours hunting, for a much smaller population.

My grandmother had to raise the meat she ate herself. That meant that meat was fairly rare, usually only on Sundays you'd get an actual piece of meat on your plate. Today we eat way more meat than in the past because it's so cheap thanks to subsidies.

Not just subsidies though, also technology and organization.

Industrial farming is a real problem, for the environment, for the animals, for the climate and for us consumers.

Refrigeration is to blame as much as anything.

Raising a cow is only a part of the problem, and it isn't that much harder to raise 10 cows than 1 cow, if you have the acreage. O(log) at the worst.

Butchering and preserving the meat was the O(n) operation, and usually required O(n) resources to salt or smoke, which could be expensive resources depending on your time and place in history.

Refrigeration changed the game, to where we could preserve the meat as fast as we could butcher it. Now instead of spending days or weeks salting, canning, smoking or curing your meat, you can fill a freezer in an afternoon.

Not that I claim to know how to factor the cost in, but meat production has negative externalities that the industry doesn't pay for. Not to mention things like water rights etc. If the farmers actually paid those costs, my guess is the price gap would close a bit.

No it is not. Please provide evidence for this claim.

https://medium.com/@laletur/should-governments-subsidy-the-m...

> According to recent data from Metonomics, the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables.

> the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries

What does that work out to per pound of meat output?

US meat production is about 100 billion pounds / year, half meat and half poultry. So removing subsidies alone would raise costs by about $0.38/lb, but it may be as much as twice that if subsidies fall primarily on one subsector.

The externalities -- both environmental and the poor labor conditions tolerated in the meat processing industry -- are probably a bigger "subsidy" than the budgetary ones.

A google search for Metonomics returns only results with this exact same quote. What is the source for this, what is meant by subsidizing an industry versus “fruits and vegetables” (ie, Is subsidized grain part of the meat industry? Why would we compare an industry to two specific categories of food?), and what does recent mean?

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