The average cow in
Listen, for example, to the European Union's agriculture commissioner, Fritz Fischler, defending the $2 per-day subsidy for cows in
He wasn't finished. "What next? Criticizing governments for spending public money on hospital beds, costly noise protection walls or fancy trees in parks rather than sending it all to
Going into the
Fritz Fischler dismisses this position with his customary tact: "If I look at the recent extreme proposal sponsored by Brazil, China, India and others, I cannot help getting the impression that they are circling in a different orbit....If they choose to continue their space odyssey they will not get the stars, they will not get the moon, they will come up with empty hands." One assumes that Fischler is ranting like this on behalf of a domestic audience that wants him to defend the interests of European farmers -- but given that farmers are only a tiny proportion of any Western population, why are they the tail that wags the dog?
Ending all agricultural subsidies in the
When Western factories shut down and shift production to
Because it's not just an industry. Farming is what has shaped the landscape that people know and love, and it's a big part of what shapes them culturally as well. No more than two or three percent of the population live on the land in any Western country these days, but it's only a century since more than half of them did. So of course people in the West feel differently when family farms go under than they do when a textile mill closes down or a telephone call centre move its operations to
Farmers, naturally, play on this sympathy for all it's worth, And the subsidies grow and grow. This creates artificial opportunities for large-scale agro-business, so soon most of the subsidies are going to big businesses, not to family farms.
Meanwhile, the global trade in food gets more and more distorted: European farmers produce sugar from beets at over twice the average cost of production of sugar cane in
What is wrong is not the wish to preserve the countryside and the rural way of life in the developed countries; it is the obsessive, doctrinaire insistence on doing it by a market model. The rich countries want to preserve the family farms because they make cultural, ecological, and even aesthetic sense. But they don't make economic sense in a global market, and all the subsidies in the world will not change that. So just acknowledge that your real goal is to preserve the rural society and landscape, and change the system. Subsidize the farmer, not the food.
It's not as simple as it sounds, of course, but it couldn't be more complicated and expensive than the current system of subsidies. It certainly wouldn't be as harmful. And at one stroke it would remove the biggest obstacle to a world of freer and fairer trade. Maybe in twenty years....
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