Farm Subsidies from Government Soared ... now what?
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/donald-trump-coronavirus-farmer-bailouts-359932
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“The top [issue] has to be the fact that you had record farm spending over these years,” Glauber said. “Most of it — the non-Covid stuff, the trade war in particular — was self-inflicted.”Glauber, who spent more than three decades at USDA until 2014, said he doesn’t fault farmers who sorely need the financial help — or Perdue and the agency officials who were directed by the White House and Congress to quickly come up with complex farm rescue plans. But he said the aid should be considered “in a more rational way,” including more direction from lawmakers about how to divvy up the money among the many sectors of agriculture.
“They’re essentially giving [USDA] a blank piece of paper and saying, ‘Here’s a bunch of money. You decide how to spend it,’” he said. “The bigger question is, if you’re spending all this money, how do you wean yourself off it?”
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I am a big fan of farming, and know people who farm, both in the US and other countries.
The gentleman is correct that you dont want to have the farmers include the subsidy payouts in their planning. That is a recipe for disaster.
I also think that the US should start to remove the support for ethanol. Never really thought that was a good idea. Ethanol requires a whole separate pipeline (no pun intended LOL) from the other energy sources.
I think the US should focus on potential bio-fuel sources which can use the same pipelines, etc as regular petroleum fuel. Malaysia used (not sure about right now) have a pretty good program to promote bio fuels. They did order that plants planted for biofuels could not replace food crops.
Thailand had a problem to try and have biofuels be 7% of the fuel supply by 2030(?). That program is somewhat on hold right now however.
In the US, not sure how you help the individual "family farm", as they are disappearing pretty fast and the "company farms" are having a bigger and bigger precent of the overall farming market.
Good discussion, but I dont have any answers.
