Quote:
Originally Posted by Ithekro
If one is having a vegetable problem, encourage farmers to export their product without really altering local prices. It reduces the local supply to match the demand while still allowing the produce to be produced. As other news has suggested serious crop shortages on other countries around the world and panic over there not being enough food.
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I don't think you can "encourage" farmers to export. Farmers already do what they can. Government saying "please" export is meaningless, unless they implement some kind of solid incentive (EG I'll pay you $5 for ever kg of produce you export). I think land buyups is a more subtle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willx
What if we need less farm land and more guns? i.e. Butter x Guns?
When do we pivot? Is the government going to decide? What about all the farmers making a living at current crop prices? Who gets to decide what is a good idea where to allocate resources that will be efficient in the long run?
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There will always be farmers looking to get out of the business. You don't force farmers to stop farming, but rather just take the land out of circulation as the opportunity presents itself.
As I see it, this is more of an environmental question then anything else. If there were no environmental considerations, the food wastage would not really be a problem. The market can simply handle it, and if it's cheaper to just open more land for agriculture then to reduce waste/ get more food from land available then full speed ahead!
However, this is an environmental issue, and is not something the market can handle. Under current market conditions, there is simply no point in reducing food waste. Food is simply too cheap for it to be an issue.
Now I generally believe that it's best whenever possible to leave things to the "market" to resolve itself. If we want to resolve the inefficiencies in food production we could have the government heavily involving itself in trying to reduce "waste", but I think it'd be quite wasteful, compared to simply working to cause a rise in food prices. If the prices go up, it will become much more profitable to try to reduce food waste. But so long as a kg of carrots is worth only a dollar, then people will worry about throwing away a kg of carrots (a hefty amount of food!) about as much as they think about losing a dollar IE not very much.
It's a simple calculus. We need to enlarge our parks for a host of reasons. We also need to raise food prices. Buying farm land is an efficient way to do both...
Also, agricultural land is often REALLY cheap. About 1000$-$2000/acre in places like south Dakota, if 1/2 of the USA land is being used for agriculture, then, you could probably buy 1/4 of the US's agricultural land (at $1000/acre) for 300 billion dollars. That's half of what the USA spends on defense in a single year, and you certainly wouldn't need to buy a 1/4 of the US's land, nor buy it all at once.