Friday, November 25, 2005

Agricultural subsidies in the US


A funny thing happened on the way to our cheap food system. The books were being cooked in a kind of shell game, Enron-style. The real cost of these monocultures were not being properly accounted for: those taxpayer-financed subsidies ($143 billion over the last decade), the unfairness that results when our excess production gets dumped on developing countries that then can't develop their own resources, the environmental effects of pesticide runoff - the list goes on.

From an op-ed in the New York Times. The subsidy regime in the US is scandalous by itself; but the one in Europe and Japan is even worse.

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