Category:Agricultural subsidies

From Appropedia

Information on Agricultural subsidies can be found at Wikipedia. What's this?

Subsidies to farmers, practiced especially by rich countries such as the USA and the EU, has several negative effects:

• Large amounts of the subsidy go to large businesses and wealthy landowners, making inequality worse.
• Countries which cannot afford to subsidise their agriculture cannot compete on the international market. This can be devastating for poor countries which can grow crops for export and have few other sources of income. (On the other hand, the poor of these countries can benefit from cheaper food, through the subsidized imports resulting from this policy.)
• From a market economics perspective, it distorts the market and makes the economy less efficient and less productive.
• It is government interference, taking money from taxpayers and giving it back to producers - while food prices tend to become lower, the savings are paid for by the taxpayer (and some of the taxes go to the profits of landowners and corporations). This is inefficient. If redistribution is necessary, there are arguably better ways to do it, such as progressive taxation^WP or even negative income tax.^WP

[edit] External links

[edit] Details of subsidies

• Farmsubsidy.org Who gets what from the Common Agricultural Policy (in the EU).
• Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database - for the USA.

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