The federal government continued its effort to boost agricultural commodity prices today by announcing it will purchase an additional $25 million
worth of pork. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also said it will buy $60 million of turkey, and $2 million of lamb. Last week, the USDA bought
approximately 200 million pounds of nonfat dry milk to help the dairy industry.
Pork farmers have been losing an average of $20 on each hog marketed since October 2007, according to the U.S. Pork Producers. And economists have
said dairy producers are losing an average of $3 per cow per day.
The U.S government indirectly subsidizes the meat industry. The cost of a common hamburger would be $35 and the cost of one pound of beefsteak would
be $89 if water was not subsidized by taxpayers.
federal and state governments subsidize the meat industry's water consumption at every stage of the process. Confined Animal Feeding Operations
(CAFOs) consume particularly egregious quantities of water.
Cornell economists, David Fields and his associate Robin Hur, have studied the fiscal consequences of water subsidies to the meat industry: “Reports
by the General Accounting Office, the Rand Corporation, and the Water Resources Council have made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to
livestock producers are economically counter productive. Every dollar that state governments dole out to livestock producers, in the form of
irrigation subsidies, actually costs tax payers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs, and reduced business income."
Economists Fields and Hur calculate the overall price of subsidizing the California meat industry’s water to be 24 billion dollars.
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