doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com pesticide

Stan, I'm not so sure that anyone would have blamed American farmers for world hunger. Not if they had their heads screwed on straight.

It's a wonderful idea to think that American agriculture can wipe out world hunger. But here's the problem: Somebody has to pay the farmer for the crops and livestock he produces. And it's usually not the starving masses in the Third World, nor is it their governments. It often ends up being OUR government, which means the American taxpayer. And that concept only goes so far--as in how much can we afford to simply give away to feed the world? It's like asking how much can we afford to spend on defense to play the world's policeman? Same concept, different problem.

Most people--if they ever knew in the first place--have forgotten that when CRP started back in 1985, it was at least as much an attempt to reduce an oversupply of grain etc which had driven prices down--and more than a few farmers out of business--as it was a conservation plan. Carter caused part of the problem when he "punished" the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan by slapping an embargo on grain (and keeping our Olympic team from participating in the Moscow games in 1980). The Russians were a big and reliable customer back then . . . until they weren't. And that was more or less the start of the farm crisis in the 80's--because you can't solve a surplus problem by giving away the surplus and not putting any money in the farmer's pocket. So we took a whole bunch of land (over 30 million acres) out of production. That's one way to deal with a surplus--but you have to pay the farmer for the land that's now growing grass or trees instead of corn or soybeans or wheat.

What DOES work for farmers is to focus on products that go to paying customers. As income increases, people pretty much all over the world tend to put more meat in their diets--because they can afford it. In the 90's, the so-called "Asian tigers" were doing very well. And it was not a coincidence that about the same time, we started seeing big hog confinement operations spring up all over Iowa. A growing marked for pork . . . or at least there was until the Asian tigers slipped into a recession. Then it's hello oversupply--and hello lower prices.

So it's not just who's hungry where, and for what--but it's also who can pay, and are we going to slap an embargo (or maybe a tariff) on agricultural commodities?

Gets really complicated in a hurry. And anyone who thinks the American farmer should be blamed for not producing enough to feed the world is thinking about the whole mess at a very basic level. And the devil, as usual, is in the details.

I was fortunate enough to live in probably the best place in the country to hunt pheasants from the late 80's to the early 2000's. And I probably killed 95% of my birds on private land. So I've always been very respectful of farmers, and living in a big farm state like Iowa (and paying more attention than most people who grew up in a city--although John Deere tractors put clothes on our backs, a roof over our heads, and food on the table when I was growing up), I was lucky enough to see a couple million acres of great pheasant habitat spring up almost overnight. And when most of those big fields went away, I understood that it was Washington--not the farmer--that was to blame. DC has been mucking around with ag policy at least since the Depression. And sometimes it's been good for both the farmer and for wildlife, and sometimes it's been good for one but not the other. I like the win/win times when there are a lot of birds, but I understand it's not really the farmer to blame when there aren't. The farmers don't make the rules, and they do the best they can in a business that can be very volatile and has to put up with a whole lot of interference from Washington.