Quote:
Originally Posted by Praxeas
Yes but we don't need to look to illegals to find those less fortunate than ourselves. There are plenty of legals and American citizens right here that need help
Do you have evidence that our extra corn is not being used for ethanol and is instead being forced on central America and Mexico and lower prices than their farmers can sell to put them out of work and off their land? Ironically a lot of our fruit comes from S. Am
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Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the impact of farm subsidies
Impact of subsidies
Farm subsidies have the direct effect of transferring income from the general tax payers to farm owners. The justification for this transfer and its effects are complex and often controversial.
[edit] Global food prices and international trade
Although some critics and proponents of the World Trade Organization have noted that export subsidies, by driving down the price of commodities, can provide cheap food for consumers in developing countries,[21][22] low prices are harmful to farmers not receiving the subsidy. Because it is usually wealthy countries that can afford domestic subsidies, critics argue that they promote poverty in developing countries by artificially driving down world crop prices.[23] Agriculture is one of the few areas where developing countries have a comparative advantage, but low crop prices encourage developing countries to be dependent buyers of food from wealthy countries. So local farmers, instead of improving the agricultural and economic self-sufficiency of their home country, are instead forced out of the market and perhaps even off their land. This occurs as a result of a process known as "international dumping" in which subsidized farmers are able to "dump" low-cost agricultural goods on foreign markets at costs that un-subsidized farmers cannot compete with. Agricultural subsidies often are a common stumbling block in trade negotiations. In 2006, talks at the Doha round of WTO trade negotiations stalled because the US refused to cut subsidies to a level where other countries' non-subsidized exports would have been competitive.[24]
Others argue that a world market with farm subsidies and other market distortions (as happens today) results in higher food prices, rather than lower food prices, as compared to a free market.[citation needed]
Mark Malloch Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Program, estimated that farm subsidies cost poor countries about USD$50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports:
"It is the extraordinary distortion of global trade, where the West spends $360 billion a year on protecting its agriculture with a network of subsidies and tariffs that costs developing countries about US$50 billion in potential lost agricultural exports. Fifty billion dollars is the equivalent of today's level of development assistance."[25][26]
[edit] Poverty in Developing Countries
The impact of agricultural subsidies in developed countries upon developing-country farmers and international development is well documented. Agricultural subsidies depress world prices and mean that unsubsidised developing-country farmers cannot compete; and the effects on poverty are particularly negative when subsidies are provided for crops that are also grown in developing countries since developing-country farmers must then compete directly with subsidised developed-country farmers, for example in cotton and sugar.[27] The IFPRI has estimated in 2003 that the impact of subsidies costs developing countries $24Bn in lost incomes going to agricultural and agro-industrial production; and more than $40Bn is displaced from net agricultural exports.[28] Moreover the same study found that the Least Developed Countries have a higher proportion of GDP dependent upon agriculture, at around 36.7%, thus may be even more vulnerable to the effects of subsidies. It has been argued that subsidised agriculture in the developed world is one of the greatest obstacles to economic growth in the developing world; which has an indirect impact on reducing the income available to invest in rural infrastructure such as health, safe water supplies and electricity for the rural poor.[29] The total amount of subsidies that g
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