One Country Did End Farm Subsidies
For debaters looking to reform federal agriculture polices, consider a successful reform overseas…
AI Overview from the land that ended federal farming subsidies and regulations: New Zealand’s agricultural sector is driven by innovative entrepreneurs and agritech pioneers who focus on sustainable farming, automation, and livestock management.
This Bloomberg video gives overview of U.S. farm programs, then discusses New Zealand’s market-based reforms.
In the video former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman notes:
First of all there is a huge about of agricultural subsidies in the United States, I mean it’s billions and billions of dollars… Farming is a precarious, tough business. These people have to deal with drought, disease, floods, tariffs, geopolitical issues…
At three minutes, the interviewer prefaces a question:
There was a time that we thought that free-markets helped discipline conduct in all sorts of places. Is there a risk with farm subsidies of basically becoming less efficient in farming?
Dan Glickman responds, yes:
…there is no question that farm subsidies kind of skew the economics, the market economics of agriculture, after all if supporting a crop with government subsidies, no longer is the market alone determining the price or location or what to produce… And also it skews the differences between the commodities. You may be supporting corn more than soybeans or wheat more than corn… that does create inefficiencies within the marketplace. On the other hand, we will probably never get rid of farm subsidies…
What Dan Glickman says can’t be done, debaters can do. Both in debate rounds this season, and with real-world public policy after. (Consider that five former homeschool debaters are now leading reforms of federal health care policy.)
After Dan Glickman, the story begins of the country that did get rid of farm subsidies (3:50)…
For more, here is Izzit.org video: No More Skinny Sheep
This 2018 article discusses New Zealand reforms in more detail: Subsidies prevent farmers from reaching their full potential (The Hill, Oct. 15, 2018).
…we should take a moment to ask what would happen if we repealed farm bill agricultural subsidies instead.
The idea may sound fanciful. We’ve had farm subsidies for over 80 years; it’s hard to conceive of an agriculture industry without extensive government intervention. But we already have a good test case for what America’s farmland would look like without the farm bill: New Zealand.
In the 1950s, New Zealand’s per-capita income ranked just behind America’s, but less than 30 years later it had languished to 27th in the world, comparable to Portugal and Turkey.
Excessive government micromanagement of its economy — price controls, trade restrictions and subsidies to prop up failing industries — led to stagnation and a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy. …