Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Barriers to "Entry"

Economists talk about the barriers to "entering" a field: profession, enterprise, whatever. The higher the costs of entry, the fewer entities will be able to compete so prices will be higher and efficiencies lower. Aimee Wittemann of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has a piece on the barriers affecting organic farmers (though she doesn't call them that). She wants the farm bill to redress the imbalance between organic and regular farmers. In doing so, she's hurting the short-term interests of current organic farmers in hopes of promoting long term interests of consumers.

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