Friday, September 05, 2008 | 7:05 a.m.

A Government Engineered Food Crisis

by Linda Chavez

As if a housing crisis, rising energy costs and a soft labor market weren't enough to cause economic anxiety for the average American, now consumers are feeling the pinch of rapidly escalating food costs. The United States has long prided itself in being the breadbasket of the world, and Americans have traditionally paid a smaller share of their income on food than citizens of other developed countries. But the days of cheap milk, bread, beef and poultry may well be over — and Uncle Sam ...

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1 Comments | Post Comment
Posted by: roswald
Comment: #1
Sat Mar 29, 2008 6:30 PM

Linda I am a corn grower. I'm 58 years old, and for 44 of those years I have planted a corn crop without exception. For easily half of those years my profit, the money that paid my living expenses, came from government subsidies. And most of the years when subsidies didn't account for my profit, government floor prices did. That's because we are too good at growing corn. It's a very easy crop to produce, and modern methods of farming make it even better. Corn became so cheap that we decided to burn it in our cars. That brought the marketplace to bear. Therein lies the rub. In order to have cheap food, we can subsidize farms, or we can have demand for all that we can grow, but we can't have both, because farmers have to make a living. We have to pay Monsanto for our seed, we have to pay big oil for our fuel and fertilizer, we have to pay pharmaceutical companies for our pesticides, we have to let mulitnational food companies make a 1000% profit on what we grow, and we have to make a living while corporate farms nibble away at us. So, we have ethanol and we are making a profit without government subsidies. It's whatever you want, but I can't work for nothing. It's the government, or the consumer, who must pay the cost.

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