I’m sure your economics professor would be most proud of you. Yes, dropping subsidies would raise prices. I said that, didn’t I?
Why sure enough, I did say that. The claim to which you are objecting is that, given the current situation, farms minus the subsidies are unprofitable. This is simple fact. That the situation is artificially created by the existence of subsidies doesn’t change the fact. The situation exists. Growing corn costs more than the corn is worth on the market. So, it’s a simple fact of the matter that if only those farmers who were turning a profit before subsidies were growing food, there would be massive food shortages. Granted, if subsidies would be removed, prices would rise, and many more farms would become profitable, and there would be food shortages only occasionally (I’ll get to that in a minute), but the solution to the problem is far from being as simple as you suggest - Econ 101 theory tends to grossly oversimplify.
First, and most importantly, this isn’t an exclusively domestic market. Food commodities are traded globally, and no single player can dominate the market. Any single government removing subsidies won’t thereby raise prices to natural levels. Granted, the US is a big player, and it alone could have significant effect, but the impact of subsidies elsewhere would continue to be felt by American farmers to a very painful degree. I’m not saying this couldn’t be done in an inventive fashion with satisfactory effects - along with diplomatic efforts to reduce subsidies elsewhere, which are after all in no small part responses to American subsidies. Recent American actions with regards to agriculture don’t give their diplomats a whole lot of credibility on that front, though, so it certainly wouldn’t be an easy task. What I can tell you is that Canada has eliminated most of its agriculture subsidies, with very painful results, not that the drought has helped. We’ve made wholesale shifts to crops currently not subsidized by the US, which has helped (that the most recent US farm bill has introduced subsidies on some of those crops will hurt badly, though, not to mention the ridiculous tariff on Canadian wheat). But a single statistic shows the story here - over 40% of Canadian farmers have off-farm jobs, and the percentage is rapidly rising. Cite. If you look at young farmers still paying for their land, the number is dramatically higher still. Obviously farming in the absence of subsidies does not pay the bills.
Second, the increase in prices resulting from subsidies isn’t immediate. Given that removing subsidies increases prices by decreasing supply, and that there are global stockpiles of various foodstuffs that would have to be eaten into a ways before significant price increases would kick in, not to mention the seasonal nature of the production of most things, we’re probably talking about a couple year delay. Dropping subsidies entirely all in one go would result in a lot of farmers who would be competitive at prices a couple years down the road going under in the mean time. When the bank is this close to foreclosing to begin with, the prospect of higher prices two years from now doesn’t do you much good when you’re forced to default on machinery payments.
Third, there’s some question about whether you want the market to be the sole arbiter of agricultural production to begin with. I think it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense to have a significant overproduction capacity built in, because mother nature has a way of biting you in the ass now and then, and there’s no quick way to counteract the impact of continent-wide drought, for example. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of one of those. Production of most grains has been down ~15-30% below normal the last couple years, but there haven’t been any food shortages. Prices have risen to about the point at which farming without subsidies would be economically viable, assuming normal yields. (Of course, many farmers haven’t harvested enough crop to be in the black even with the increased prices, but in those places where it has rained, things are going quite nicely.) If the market were solely responsible here, our agricultural capacity would be, apparently, ~15-30% lower, and when that system took a 15-30% hit in production from widespread drought, there would be food shortages, and there’s sweet fuck all you can do to get an instantaneous burst of production to compensate for it - all you could really do would be to pass feed-grain-quality stuff off as milling quality, though that would necessitate decreasing total beef and hog herd sizes, in turn diminishing production capacity for ensuing years even further. Probalby no one would starve, but it could be damn unpleasant. Now, there are means beyond subsidies for dealing with that issue - maintaining strategic stockpiles of cereal grains, for example - but it’s not an issue that rational people would ignore.
Now this is just ignorance. Sure, there are some inefficient farms, but no more than in any other industry. Most farms would operate comfortably in the black at commodity prices which would exist if there were no subsidies anywhere in the world. Now, the current number of farms couldn’t exist in that system, since that system would raise prices by shrinking supply, and it would do so by driving some farmers out of business in advance of price increases, and presumably the least efficient farms would be the casualties in that situation. However, most of the farms that went under in the process would have been profitable at the final equilibrium prices. That reaching that equilibrium requires farms to go under isn’t particularly relevant.
Now, perhaps you would care to further explain to me how my lack of understanding of rudimentary principles of economics is interfering with my understanding of agricultural policy?
What I said, since you apparently missed it the first time and the second time, was that given the current political realities, which include current subsidy structures, the fact that farmers require subsidies to survive isn’t due to inefficiency or incompetence or lack of hard work, and most certainly doesn’t make them “welfare queens”. Or, as I put it the first time, with subsidies in place, if only farmers who were in the black sans subsidies farmed, you’d go hungry - it’s the subsidies which create a reliance on subsidies, not anything about farmers. This fact isn’t changed by the preferability of removing subsidies.