IMHO, Pollan seems to give a very good short summary of how the agricultural policy we had from the New Deal through 1972 did a good job of doing exactly what a farm policy ought to do, namely smooth out the cycles of bumper-crop boom and bad-weather bust. The inherent problem with bumper crops is that they contain their own accelerator mechanism -- the lower the price goes, the more farmers sell to recoup their sunk costs. The New Deal regime counteracted this perfectly. It kept farmers from bankrupting themselves, moderated prices in types of scarcity, and, most surprising of all in view of present difficulties, *paid for itself.* It seems rather like the model of a rational farm policy.
The post-Butz regime, on Pollan's account, has done exactly the opposite. It not only doesn't smooth the production cycle, it adds to its accelerator effects. It encourages overproduction, which then requires subsidies to keep the farmers from going bankrupt, which encourages more overproduction.
Now leaving to one side for the moment the alleged bad effects of overproduction (whether on cotton producers in Mali or fat kids) it seems clearly to be an irrational regime purely in fiscal terms, simply because it costs taxpayers 20 billion dollars a year where the previous regime cost them nothing. And why did we change? For the worst of policy reasons -- because a passing political conjuncture got set in stone. We didn't get a change in regime because there was political pressure for it from producers. They were making profits under the old policy regime.
So the logical course for fiscal reasons alone, forgetting everything else, seems simply to go back to the old policy regime designed to discourage overproduction and moderate consumer prices -- the one that paid for itself. Clearly, if one believes that subsidized overproduction has other detrimental side effects, like on cotton producers in Mali, that would be an added incentive. But it seems to make pellucid sense purely in fiscal and economic terms.
Does anyone see any obvious holes in that argument?
I'd also like to note that neither policy regime is in any way a free market regime. The US has not had a free market in agriculture in our lifetimes (and what it had before was periodic disaster, which was why it stopped). The choice seems rather between a market buffered by rational non-market mechanisms or a market stimulated by irrational non-market mechanisms. And it isn't wealth that leads to market regulation. The original mechanism was set up to deal with poverty, in the depths of the depression -- and, as I keep repeating, paid for itself, making it perfectly suited for any other poor country.
If we agreed on this basic point, that there is no such thing as a free market in agriculture (except disastrous ones), it might come in handy in discussing the global aspects of agriculture and economic development. The dismantling of such things as the cocoa regime in Ivory Coast or the peanut regime in Senegal seem to be based on ignorance of this economic history.
Michael