Add $7.0 billion annually in corn ethanol subsidies – helping to link the price of corn to the price of gasoline – poor harvests worldwide, and the high price of energy, and you can get things like this:
There appears to be no federally-recommended dietary allotment for mud.
The usual answer, as with biofuels, is that subsidies are always bad, and that a thorough liberalization of the agricultural sector will solve all of our problems. I don’t know if that’s true. The problems here seems to be A) we are subsidizing inefficient uses of resources, and, independently, B) competition for resources is pricing the poor out of the market. Perhaps if cattle feed/corn ethanol costs were not subsidized, American farmers would efficiently grow more inexpensive grains to feed the world’s poor. Optionally, they might stop growing corn, and instead grow something else that sells to well-fed people with lots of disposable income, or get out of farming entirely. I don’t know enough about the farming business to tell you which one is more likely to come to pass, but I see no general reason to think the first is any more likely than the second, and I see no reason why the second is less of an obscenity than what we have now. If there’s $1.5 billion available to subsidize delicious, nutritious tobacco – to say nothing of the untold billions we spend subsidizing the delusions of the most hated President in history – there’s probably money available to feed starving children, even at the current, extravagant cost of $0.16 a meal.
May 5, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I dunno. “Libertarians” encourage me to vote GOP. So I guess, after 7+ years of GOP rule, we have an efficient, market-based agricultural market.
Right?
May 5, 2008 at 7:11 pm
I was kind of wondering about the tobacco subsidy too. WTF? Let’s subsidize poison ivy while we’re at it.
May 5, 2008 at 7:56 pm
If you are in charge of ADM or Cargill and you can make a gallon of ethanol and sell it profitably for less than the price of a gallon of gas, you will.
The subsidy makes some difference, but the price of gas is the important factor.
The weak dollar has caused much of the price in crease in oil, so has far more effect than the subsidy.
May 5, 2008 at 8:15 pm
But you see, the option you don’t even MENTION is that we can change exactly nothing, pander to imaginary farmers who exist only in the heads of campaign strategists, and talk about how everybody who is poor has made “bad choices” and deserves his poverty. I mean, honestly. Why couldn’t they just choose to be born white and middle class in America, huh?
A.
May 5, 2008 at 9:24 pm
word.
so right on. i think if farming was again made into a smaller-scale operation, you would see the revival of towns all over the midwest of our country (and maybe a bit of de-dustification in the central valley of california), as more farmers were needed to work the land, and as more farmers chose to grow more interesting crops. essentially we need to destroy ADM and Cargill and Monsanto, or change their workings so much as to make them unrecognizable. smaller scale would in my opinion lead to greater output, greater health, better topsoil, saner economic policy and a greener outlook, plus quite possibly be a driver of green energy policy.
or, we can have this fucked up abomination of a farm bill. but i don’t think we can have both.
May 5, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Those sand cookies look delicious! If they’re so “hard up” why do they have butter and salt to flavor their delicious dirt meals? These hungry people are a bunch of elitist, humbugs who just want me too feel bad because I’m super talented and earned all this delicious beef. Just because you get born here or there doesn’t mean you have to be so dreary with your bloated stomaches and your scurvey. La dee da, Monsieur! Does Whitney from “The Hills” complain because she has the pelvis of a clydesdale? No. Does President Laura Bush do you a favor Burma by not bombing your asses pre-Exxon forced village pipeline slavery program? Hell yeah!
So why don’t they just eat Top Ramen?
What?
May 6, 2008 at 1:22 am
Anyone who uses a dishonest misleading thieving pyramid graph — where the volume of the various pieces of pyramid bear no relationship to the 11 servings, 9 servings and 6 servings that they’re supposed to represent — is guilty of a Chartjunk Crime. The guilty parties should be beaten repeatedly over the head with a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, before indefinite imprisonment in Edward Tufte’s re-education gulag. One day they’ll thank us for it.
May 6, 2008 at 5:33 am
Vegetarian for 15 years now and still loving it. Compassionate, eco-friendly, and healthy. And getting dirty in the veggie garden is way more spiritual for me than going to church.
Come join us.
May 6, 2008 at 9:04 am
It oughta be mentioned that calling corn “cattle feed” is like calling corn “cat food”. Cows aren’t supposed to eat that crap.
In fact, if we were raising cows on grass, the food they were meant to eat, we’d be getting meat and dairy of a higher quality, nutritional density, and without the nasty medicines they require to keep them alive on that diet. We’d be getting less of it, and it would cost more, which also wouldn’t be such a tragedy. But perhaps most importantly, we’d be turning grass into something we can eat, instead of using something we can already eat in a way that’s inefficient and causes the cow to get really sick.
May 6, 2008 at 10:05 am
Yes, this is pretty much what turned me vegetarian (with, unfortunately, some later backsliding). It’s not as if this is some new analysis. Go read Diet for a Small Planet, first published circa 1972. And chiggins is right on.
May 6, 2008 at 10:25 am
I’ve always preached that people should become “meatatarians” so animals will stop feeding off precious mother Earth. I think that is what’s truly eco-friendly.
May 6, 2008 at 10:28 am
The original design of the farm bill was designed to help the small farmer stay in business and like most bills, it has somehow evolved to subsidize the large factory farms making 100s of thousands of dollars. We need to have congress change this. In Europe they do subsidize the small family farms and I think we need to do this in America. But with the corporations driving everything in our country I don’t hold much hope. Factory farms are bad in every way; bad for the animals, for people and the environment.
May 6, 2008 at 12:20 pm
@ Sirened:
The term you’re looking for is “carnivore,” and I’ve already heard every veggie-bashing joke there is. But don’t worry, I don’t take myself too seriously, and I’ve made plenty of plant-based-diet jokes at my own expense. The “Hey, if I forget to bring my lunch I can go outside and eat grass” goes over big.
The flaw in your plan is obvious: once you’ve succeeded in eating all the animals to save Gaia, then what? You’re left no choice but to become a VEGETARIAN, and probably an America-hating, baby-raping, islamo-commie faggit besides. Driving a my-sister’s-vibrator-has-more-power-than-this electric car, no doubt.
Or wait — you could switch to cannibalism! Eat the babies after you rape them, so you wouldn’t have to go veg. God forbid.
I’d post a gratuitous Magma video to extrapolate this point further, but the fascist meat-eater management blocks our youtube access at work.
May 7, 2008 at 4:00 pm
[…] Why are fruit and vegetables more expensive, relatively, than meat? The Poor Man explains. Not only educational, but funny, too! […]
May 8, 2008 at 8:16 am
I personally don’t crave meat or even meat substitutes, but otherwise, this guy pretty much nails everything:
http://www.slate.com/id/2190872/
excerpt: “I’ve been vegetarian for a decade, and when it comes up, I still get a look of confused horror that says, “But you seemed so … normal.” The U.S. boasts more than 10 million herbivores today, yet most Americans assume that every last one is a loopy, self-satisfied health fanatic, hellbent on draining all the joy out of life. Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue. So read on, my flesh-eating friends—I believe it’s high time we cleared a few things up.”