On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 03:24:31PM +0000, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > the evil in current US and EU agricultural subsidies, as with most subsidies, > is that they favour industrialised agriculture and products that can come out > of industrialised agriculture. these happen to be cereal crops (or sugar > producing crops such as beet). this is bad for the environment and unhealthy. > but i'm not sure that it is accurate to claim that such subsidies are the > main reason for the lower price of processed foods - they would provide a > price reduction to unprocessed cereal produce, and processed foods would > remain cheaper even without such subsidies.
The claim is not that more subsidies are the main reason for lower price of processed foods. The claim is that more subsidies are the main reason for *more processed foods*-- and this is what is bad. Although part of this is for exactly the reason you note: longer shelf life. Wheat flour, corn, corn flour are all (relatively) perishable, and we have WAY too much of it, so we have all kinds of incentives to process it in all kinds of non-sensical cream-filled ways; we put corn in everything, starting with soda (which btw is cheaper than water and easier to get where I live). I.e., if it is cheaper to make twinkies than carrots it is because the ingredients for twinkies are all but free today, and people spend their lives thinking up new ways to twinkify everything, perhaps even including carrots, if the strange orange sticklets with sauce in children's lunch packaging is any clue. :) ck
