Farmer subsidies hit shoppers' wallets
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The reason your computer is affordable and the plasma television screen on your wall costs $1,500 instead of $7,500 is ever increasing free trade. Fortunately, these two items are not subsidized; otherwise the aforementioned would not be true.
Many agricultural products are subsidized. If subsidies were eliminated or reduced, your food would be cheaper (ability to buy from cheapest producer), your taxes would be lower (because you pay for farmer subsidies), and farmers in developing countries would earn more because a level playing field would exist.
A subsidy is a government handout to farmers of developed countries, averaging $33,000 to each corporation, the top 10 percent, and $721 per year to each small farmer, the bottom 80 percent, so they will not farm their land or because they are inefficient and cannot even compete with developing countries such as Mozambique, one of the world’s cheapest sugar producers, yet one of the world’s poorest nations.
Because prices of agricultural products in the United States and European Union are artificially low due to subsidies, natives of developing countries not only cannot sell their food on the international market, but it is actually cheaper for them to buy subsidized goods.
Not only do subsidies unemploy the most efficient producers, but they kick the ladder of potential progress out from under them as well.
Nicholas Hunt
Bettendorf
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