On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 10:11:11AM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > Agreed - that and chains like whole foods. But how much does this gel with > the other fact, about a hundred or so small american farmers going bankrupt > every other month (or year)?
small american farmers (and european ones) are going bankrupt despite enormous subsidies partly because the subsidies are tailored towards large industrial farmers. e.g. they favour grain products rather than, say, organic blueberries (which the US doesn't subsidise at all). while the growth of organic food products and farmers' markets and the usually higher prices (some) people are willing to pay for them is interesting, the farmers who can / do take advantage of this are not necessarily the same as those going out of business farming something else. one of the slightly more intelligent voices in the farming debate in europe (where each cow gets a subsidy of 2 euro a day, more than most people in the world live on) is the austrians, who have been trying without much success to move subsidies from things that are industrialised and already cheap (and when made cheaper ruin the livelihoods of farmers in poor countries who don't have subsidies) to expensive, small-scale, local organic produce. > All due respect to sainath, but the israeli kits are actually very good.. > and if people are able to grow crops in a wasteland like the negev, they are > clearly effective. at what? his point was that they are very expensive, and israeli agriculture based on them wouldn't survive without massive US aid. it's hard to argue with that partly because the size of US aid is so huge that its effects are pervasive. "miraculous" farming often takes place in the presence of enormous (sometimes hidden) subsidies - californian oranges come to mind, grown as they are in a desert with fertile soil and water diverted from other states at enormous subsidised cost. -rishab
