All countries have bad policies. What matters is whether we have systems in place that will reform or abolish them. Few policies are as unambiguously bad as the rich countries' agricultural policies.
- They are capitalised into land values, thereby intensifying agriculture, and so worsening the environment and animal welfare, as well as making the entry of young people into farming impossible.
- They benefit wealthy landowners at the expense of consumers, taxpayers and food-rich developing countries.
- They generate overproduction of unhealthy products, which are then disposed of to the detriment of people's health.
These policies have been widely challenged for decades; there's been some tinkering but, we still see, focusing on point (2):
Thousands of small farms have closed according to analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states. ...The European Union gave generous farming subsidies to the companies of more than a dozen billionaires between 2018 and 2021... including companies owned by the former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and the British businessman Sir James Dyson. Billionaires were “ultimate beneficiaries” linked to €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of EU farming handouts over the four-year period even as thousands of small farms were closed down, according to the analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states. ...“It’s madness,” said Benoît Biteau, a French organic farmer and MEP for the Greens in the last European parliament. “The vast majority of farmers are struggling to make a living.” Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian, 3 November 2024
The stated objectives behind these corrupt policies sound grand: to secure the food supply (with huge quantities of imported oil) and, laughably, to protect the family farm.
Perhaps the most important advantage of a Social Policy Bond regime would be that politicians would have to bind the financing of their policies inextricably to their stated goals. Under the current systems, they can get away with burying the actual goals (transferring money from the poor to rich individuals and, increasingly, corporations), under grandiose rhetoric and reams of legislation and regulation. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, policy outcomes and financing for their achievement would be exactly congruent. Unfortunately, the lobbies that resist reform can afford to do so precisely because of the subsidies they receive. So much so that, as Mr Niranjan points out:
The EU gives one-third of its entire budget to farmers through its common agricultural policy (Cap), which hands out money based on the area of land a farmer owns rather than whether they need the support.
Agriculture is one sector with which the governments have enmeshed themselves for decades. Government involvement, though, need not be corrupt nor corrupting. A bond regime could ensure that governments would intervene to bring about only the outcomes that are supported by a consensus of the people they are supposed to represent.
