Seeker Blog

Almost every rich country has this evil — the EU is probably the worst at depressing the growth of modern agriculture in the developing world:

You have heard this before, but as Orwell put it, “we have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn’t receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation from said recipients understand that Americans are spending billions to prop up the last of the horse-and-buggy industries.

At this nation’s founding, nearly nine out of 10 workers were employed in agriculture. By 1900 that fell to fewer than four in 10. Today, fewer than one in every 100 workers is in agriculture, and less than 1% of gross domestic product is attributable to agriculture. Yet this country spends billions upon billions of dollars subsidizing a system that makes almost everyone in the world worse off….

Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This is repugnant because agriculture is a keystone industry for developing nations and a luxury for developed ones. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable. Our farm subsidies alone — forget trade barriers — cost developing countries $24 billion every year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Letting poor nations prosper would be worth a lot more than the equivalent amount in foreign aid.

From Jonah Goldberg at the LA Times.

At Growthology, Tim Kane headlines his excellent piece Food Crisis and Shameless Protectionism

The revolution in farming, not computerization, is arguably the most important innovation of the 20th century. History may well remember Deng Xiaopeng’s liberalization of small-farm profit incentives as a greater innovation than GUI computing or WSYWIG printing. But farming innovation has stagnated in many respects, and part of the problem is that people just don’t get angry enough about protectionism.

Definitely RTWT.

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