THE UNITED STATES
Two words: Farm Bill
The Americans openly support their agriculture industry while remaining an export powerhouse, due to their enormous natural legacy. With so much of the world’s arable land falling within their borders, and an excellent agricultural climate, they’ve been a global leader in agriculture production for two centuries.
Their existing agricultural policy is often said to be a cheap food policy, but it’s perhaps more accurately described as a cheap raw materials policy for their titanic agrifood industry, which exports value added products around the globe.
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The obvious question, of course, is just how long this level of support can continue in the face of trillion-dollar annual federal deficits. The answer? Nobody knows, though this sort of speculation has been going on for many years, and the Farm Bill still manages to be renewed every five years like clockwork.
THE EUROPEAN UNION
Three words. Common Agricultural Policy
Like the U.S., the EU has a long tradition of subsidizing agriculture, though there’s a key difference that can be summed up in a single word: intermodality. That’s the concept that farms perform a lot of valuable services for the rest of society, for which they deserve compensation.
While that might sound like a good deal, it’s important to note that there’s a downside to this model. It means society has come to expect more from farms in terms of responsibility and that’s meant more and more regulation over the years.
One example of this in action is the much slower rate of adoption of GM crops in the EU , driven largely by public pressure to keep them out.
AUSTRALIA
‘Down under’ intends to come out on top
The Great Brown Land is often seen as a mirror image of Canada with a hotter climate, but it has proven to be a lot more innovative and forward thinking in a lot of areas.
They’ve led the pack in deregulation and slashing subsidies, but by being proactive, they’ve also been able to move when they were ready and get things right. One of the areas they stand out the most is in the ways they’ve organized their industries.
They unwound their Australian Wheat Board slowly over the course of many years, and despite the fact that the company got into hot water in recent years over Oil For Food kickback schemes, observers say that their grains industry, and the farmers within it in particular, were able to adapt well to these changes.
Likewise, they wound up their dairy supply management scheme over the course of about two decades by taxing milk products to compensate producers for the loss. They’re also acknowledged to have one of the best systems of publicly funded grains research going, which combines farmer checkoffs with government dollars.
