Why aren't conservatives, in general? :roll: The biggest beneficiaries of most if not all agricultural subsidies are the companies and individuals which own the most land. Handing over vast sums of money to the already-rich is not and never has been a 'liberal' agenda - least of all when it often comes at the expense of potential livelihoods of third world farmers. The primary (and perhaps only) popular justification of such practices is a nationalist 'America first' mentality horrified at the prospect of other countries out-competing one's own.
Farm Subsidies That Kill - The New York Times (2002)
The U.S., Europe and Japan spend $350 billion each year on agricultural subsidies (seven times as much as global aid to poor countries), and this money creates gluts that lower commodity prices and erode the living standard of the world's poorest people.
''These subsidies are crippling Africa's chance to export its way out of poverty,'' said James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, in a speech last month.
Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program, estimates that these farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports. By coincidence, that's about the same as the total of rich countries' aid to poor countries, so we take back with our left hand every cent we give with our right.
''It's holding down the prosperity of very poor people in Africa and elsewhere for very narrow, selfish interests of their own,'' Mr. Malloch Brown says of the rich world's agricultural policy.
It also seems a tad hypocritical of us to complain about governance in third-world countries when we allow tiny groups of farmers to hijack billion of dollars out of our taxes.
For example, the U.S. has only 25,000 cotton growers, but they are prosperous (with an average net worth of $800,000) and thus influential. So the U.S. spends $2 billion a year subsidizing them, and American production of cotton has almost doubled over the last 20 years -- even though the U.S. is an inefficient, high-cost producer. The result is a glut that costs African countries $250 million each year, according to a World Bank study published in February.
Yet again, we see how telling it is when certain folk choose to fixate on biofuel crops, rather than the broader issues which have been known and widely discussed for decades.