Engineer-Poet
2008-03-26 20:33:51
Actually, the best way to get rid of surpluses is not to grow them in the first place. The USA used to have a program that did that, and reserves sufficient to deal with a bad harvest. Then we had some folks deciding that they could do things on the cheap and let someone else hold the reserves, a bad harvest caused prices to skyrocket, and we got a “grow everything we can” farm program.
Huge surpluses led to ethanol as a farm-price support program. Ethanol led to skyrocketing prices. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
