Water subsidies for agriculture have been pretty destructive. Water is diverted from people and environments that need it for crazy things like rice paddies in the arid parts of California. It’s especially bad since we are using up more fresh water than is sustainable; we are relying on deposits of water from the last Ice Age that will inevitably run out.
And the western states, and the southern states, and the northeastern states. That’s partly why they’re so entrenched.
It’s even more insidious than that. Agricultural subsidies started with the best of intentions, specifically, to preserve excess perishable goods (grain, dairy, meat) production capacity in fallow so that if you have a lean year you still have enough production to meet demand. This also (in theory) helps protect the market against monopolization and cartels by allowing smaller, “less efficient” farming operations be viable against massive corporate and collective agriculture, so it is intended to protect the consumer and the economy as a whole as well as smaller farms.
The reality is that such protections are used by the agricultural industry as a whole to artificially raise the price of perishable goods well beyond what a healthy market would demand, and actually result in considerable wastage, primarily benefiting the large corporate and collective farming enterprises that can produce greater yields. It has also led to homogenization of crops (both species and variations within species) that leave yields vulnerable to infection and parasites and markets as a whole subject to higher level manipulation, which has resulted in driving smaller farming operations either out of business or toward low-duration boutique crops of lesser gross caloric value (basically the antithesis of the Green Revolution). It also encourages the tragedy of the commons: I’ll produce as much product as possible in order to use or obtain the maximum subsidy, even if it is more than the market can bear. Similarly, resource subsidies, particularly water usage, encourage use of precious and non-sustainable resources without limit or consideration for future effects.
Price protections and limited-life subsidies are probably necessary to protect the diversity of the agricultural industry over the long term, as immediate responses to short term fluctuations in the market of a pure laissez-faire approach can’t see beyond the next peak, but the truth is they get hijacked by the self-serving interests they are intended to protect against. A long-term inflexible system of agricultural subsidies only serves to create a highly artificial marketplace that doesn’t benefit the consumer.
Stranger
Well, I can see the value in having a secure domestic food supply but as the world’s largest exporter of food, I am not sure that this should be very high on our list of concerns.
Better still you can get farm subsidies and not even farm a thing:
Cows do not need any help digesting corn. Hormones and antibiotics are sometimes overused, but they do not help a cow digest corn. Cows can digest corn just fine.
This could be one of those rare issues on which left and right agree - from which only the lobbying and political classes actually benefit.