Commercial farming is also "subsistence" if you don't have enough savings. If your crop is inedible you still have to buy food from somewhere with something ..
Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.
I don't see how that is possible as most of these people are doing subsistence farming. They eat their economic output themselves, there is nobody to underpay them. On the contrary their main problem is that there isn't some large corporation there to enhance their productivity with heavy machinery and fertilizers in exchange for a fraction of the yields.
A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. That is how you get those less than two dollars a day figures. They simply aren't using money. The food they produce and eat is definitely worth two dollars. When you look at the economics of commercial farming, most of the cost is spent on inputs such as synthetic fertilizer and seeds. There was a hybrid rice company telling you, you can earn a whopping $1000 per unit of land, all you have to do is pay them $800 for the inputs. You still have to pay for the land and the equipment. The seed and fertilizer companies are earning most of the money. Meanwhile if you are a simple subsistence farmer you don't have a thousand dollars, so you will have to borrow the money and if your country isn't self sufficient agriculturally and bleeding money because of trade deficits then what is it exporting to buy the inputs? It is not like you are selling basic necessities to some high tech country that is better off doing something else. So you borrow money from foreign countries in a foreign currency, a currency that is much more stable than yours. This is hardly a business model that works for the poor. Whenever people talk about GMOs, they think the fundamental problem of agriculture is that there is an insufficient quantity of food, when the actual problem is that the economy needs to formalise and poor people need access to markets to buy or sell things.
As has been confirmed in 95% of previous land reform efforts, farming is not "profiteering". When you take productive land from its owners and give it to the politically connected, you're left with unproductive land.
Do you think donating some money to farmers is going to help in any way? The government has been doing that for a long time (through subsidies and minimum purchase prices), at a much larger scale than any single person is capable of. And it hasn't improved anything much.
I think it is clear that the only way to improve conditions is to enable farmers to convert their business into a sustainable one. And for that, cheap/free internet access could prove to be the turnaround factor.
I've talked about this with Farmer Markets, one of the problem I found was monetization. They all love the idea but when I talk about money they back out.
You think so? Have you ever tried farming before? It's a rough life, and they never make money; they live off subsidies. When you own land you have to care for it and that costs: money, time and a substantial amount of effort. Most farmers I know would love to sell, but there is no one willing/able to buy.
Nothing is clouding the issue. You are fabricating a contrived scenario which doesn’t exist today.
The “surplus” is what producers use to pay back the loans they took out to be able to produce as much as they currently do. If they produce no “surplus”, they are trying to build a simple subsistence production which is not feasible in a modern society. No bank will loan them money and they can’t afford to insure against bad weather/crop/prices. They can’t produce large enough yields to benefit from Economies of Scale, so they work long hours using low tech and have small yields which have to compete against the high yields of their industrial-scale neighbors, so they make little return on their hard toil.
You are trying to remove free market mechanics without any discernible reason. For the same reason that most farms/ranches today are big industrial operations (at least in the USA where regulations permit it), small subsistence producers can’t make a living and die off unless they can find a brand niche. The same would happen in this hypothetical future where whatever event you think happened would drive subsistence farmers into bankruptcy and lead to consolidation.
No, because the money would be going into the business of serving an entire nation of farmers with these services. The cost for each instance of doing the fundamental thing, having a farmer sell to consumers, would hopefully be low.
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