= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nisan comments on Vegetarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (165)
Vegetarians tell me that this is because of agricultural subsidies.
I grew up on a beef farm. There were no agricultural subsidies of that kind in place in the jurisdiction. It was still profitable to sell beef and the prices were not particularly exorbitant.
What did you feed them? I strongly suspect that's where the subsidies would show up.
What I hear is that it's water prices- if they were allowed to float, that would dramatically raise the price of meat. But I haven't researched that issue, so treat that as hearsay.
Ridiculous subsidies to the agricultural industry is not a worldwide phenomenon.
Pun intended? (Incidentally the prices are allowed to float here.)
Lucky! Are you outside the OECD? I haven't looked into it heavily, but I was under the impression that all of those countries had rather massive agricultural supports.
Given that I mentioned my background I assume you mean lucky for everyone else. Subsidies may not be efficient but the actual recipients tend to benefit. More government based income would have been handy.
New Zealand then Australia (here) are the most efficient agricultural producers in the OECD in terms of Producer Subsidy Estimate (PSE). About one fifth of the average. We tend to be the ones bitching about subsidies (and tariffs). Their impact on us is primarily to damage our export market.
Does this make sense?
I've heard the figure that cattle require 40 units of grain to produce beef with as many calories as one unit of grain. If this is true, and beef costs only ten times as much as flour, we should be subsidizing about 75% of the cost of raising cattle beyond whatever subsidies we have for the grain we feed them (much of the latter should be reflected in ground corn and wheat flour prices).
I don't actually know the numbers. My uneducated hunch is that we subsidize, but not to that level. I could also be missing something important in my model, like if the way we subsidize corn makes it basically free to feed to cattle, but still costly to feed to humans.
I wouldn't be surprised if transportation + milling + packaging make for a lot of this difference. I would expect bulk meat prices per unit to drop more slowly than bulk grain prices per unit, which is in the right direction to turn a 1:40 ratio into a 1:10 ratio.