What do you guys think about the idea of agricultural subsidies for Canadian farmers?
I used to be totally for the idea, but now I’m a little unsure.
My original stance was that we need to help our farmers by subsidizing their crops. A lot of them are no longer making a profit, and some will soon go out of business. Since locally grown food is good for the economy, we want to maintain a strong agricultural sector that won’t go out of business in the next decade.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with people about this topic. It’s come to my attention that subsidies are often bad for developing nations who cannot compete with subsidized crops. I’ve also received the argument that simply giving cash to farmers isn’t going to solve the problem, and that we need to concentrate more on specializing our agricultural sector towards the production of non-GMO foods.
I also have a YouTube video that includes my musings about agricultural subsidies (among other things), and some comments and video responses that were not in favour of the idea.
What do you think? Should the federal government give more money to our farmers, or should we let the free market take care of itself?
Randy
