Resistance to a blockade doesn’t require subsidies for growing flowers etc.
Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
There’s a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to justify.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The US’s domestic demand for food is vastly below the actual production, exports and biofuels need not be maintained in a war.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.