Clearly we need a food supply but why do we need to prop up unsustainable businesses that are over-producing demand? Farmers are massively subsidized and still barely make ends meet. Is that actually beneficial?
I ask this as someone who paid for books and beer in college working on farms.
But if that ever actually happened, those countries could blockade the United States and cut off the food supply. It would be a shitshow. Imagine the 1970s oil crisis, but instead of being unable to drive anywhere, mass famines occurred.
In Canada, we don't use subsidies for the dairy market. We use "supply management" where we make it difficult to import butter or milk and ban farmers from producing too much of it. This keeps the prices artificially high which allows for farmers to continue domestic production in a HCOL country. However, 4 sticks of butter costs $6.
For critical infrastructure though, outsourcing is the wrong move. This is because the consequences of failure are borne by society instead of the corporation.
If Americans were banned from all social media tomorrow, realistically there wouldn't be mass rioting and civil unrest. Contrast if you found out tomorrow that the USA only has 7 days worth of food for all its citizens, and no more is coming. Are you going to start killing people to boost your odds of survival?
Labor is far from the only input into agriculture. The US’ advantages in arable land acreage, agricultural technology, and chemical inputs seem sufficiently efficient that the US is (and long has been) a net exporter of agricultural commodities.
One guy in the air-conditioned cab of his fancy tractor hauling his 40-meter-wide planter or 186-liter-per-second combine [0] can do the work of hundreds of his manual-farmhand counterparts without even taking out his earbuds.
Do you imagine that you would start “killing people to boost your odds of survival”?
[0] https://www.deere.ca/en/products/planting-equipment/db120-48... and https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/x-series-combines/
My point is the "vast quantity of good land" the USA has would be useless in a short-term famine scenario. It takes months to grow food. If there's a scenario in which the USA has outsourced its entire food supply overseas, and that food supply is cut off, unless there's a 3-4 month stockpile of food for every person in America and the USA figures out how to restart its entire farming system in a week, people are dying en masse.
Even if that occurs, there's still going to be riots like COVID-style runs on toilet paper.
That's why food self-sufficiency is critical to national security.
Many people "know" this but have zero idea what is actually in the Farm Bill.
Check your understanding. Threads like this on many kinds of topics are full of debate between people who barely know anything beyond vague facts absorbed through osmosis over the years.
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
I assumed that included local megafarms too.