Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Food Prices and Free Trade

The locavore movement should endorse tariffs--they keep out competing cheaper produce from outside (as in the criticism of NAFTA--Mexican corn farmers are suffering from US corn and FL tomato growers worried about Mexican tomatoes). Now, via Farm Policy, comes a report that many nations are reducing agricultural tariffs as a measure to fight the rise in food costs.

It's all sort of reminiscent of the 70's. Speaking of which, Tom Philpott is reading Dan Morgan's Merchants of Grain, which was written in 1979, providing an excerpt mentioning the buying of American farmland by foreign investors, the expansion of irrigation, and the conversion of old soil bank land back to crops.

Of course, one remembers the 1980's as well, when a conservative Republican President did the biggest land diversion program ever (in 1983).

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