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[Food Inc] Monsanto: Evil corporation, or the Evilest corporation?
Posts
Transfats have existed and been bad for you long since before GM-food came into existence.
I call bullshit. Agriculture as a percentage of US GDP: 0.7%. That's all of agriculture, not only corn.
And more importantly, I can think of no profession in which people expect to do exactly the same thing for their entire career. Similar things yes, but I'd like someone to convince me that a farmer is incapable of learning how to grow a different crop.
Or they could, y'know, stop being farmers. And not get massive subsidies just so they can stay afloat, like everyone else.
And are you trying to say that having high-fructose corn syrup in practically everything (there is corn in my fucking peanuts) isn't bad for us? That making bread with HFCS instead of, I don't know, bread isn't the best? HFCS are the simplest of the simple sugars, and yeah, while they're maybe not any worse for you than cane sugar, who the hell would expect to find cane sugar in wheat bread? I know I wouldn't.
This also goes for the beef which, as I've pointed out, because it's raised on corn has a bunch of marbling (which is what they base USDA grades around, the more the better) which is what causes such high saturated fat content in beef, in addition to creating an environment rich with opportunities for bacterial infections.
And by "frankenfoods," I'm not referring specifically to GM food (though, in the case of corn, there isn't a non-GM version of it, so there, yeah, they happen to be the same), but to the things we make from corn, like your average meal from McDonald's.
So far, three separate hypotheses on the first question in this thread (Iowa, regulation fail, Nixon fail), and no answers to the second.
This is one reason why we have had bread before globalization allowed sugar to be widely shipped all over the world.
No, they don't. Because the costs to third world nations are exponential while the costs to American Tax Payers are linear. I.E. Third world nations which need agricultural production to both feed their people[and can't due, not a small amount due to our subsidies] lose growth. This means they lose a few % per year. This compounds over 40-50 years to simply fuck them.
In raw GDP you can expect the difference over 40 years of 1% growth to produce about 49% of growth over your initial starting GDP. At 3% growth you produce 226% growth over those same 40 years. This doesn't even get into the problems of poverty traps et al.
to put this in perspective, the GDP of Ghana is about 31.13 billion. Ghana is growing pretty well right now, but Africa as a whole largely has not[averaging iirc, 1.9% since the 50s]. Assuming a 2% jump in GDP from a lack of subsidies, which is reasonable considering the average African economy is >50% agriculture you're looking at a difference over 40 years of about +30 billion per year GDP.
Which is to say that the estimates i've heard that state that the 19 billion of subsidies that the U.S. give each year have cause roughly 180 billion dollars in damage to third world countries per year seems pretty reasonable to me.
edit: There is a book by Jeffery Sachs "The End of Poverty" which is very good which describes the effect I am talking about.
Short answer: Yes it does.
I'm just saying, it's not extreme OHMIGODCAPITALISM to find "sugar" listed as an ingredient in bread.
Of course corn syrup is pretty WTF.
Farmers in the midwest do rotate crops in order to replenish the soil. Soybeans and Corn.
Growth doesn't work that way. Where does the cumulative percentage growth come from? Accumulation of human capital, infrastructure, capital - it doesn't magically automatically appear out of nowhere.
And agricultural exports are very bad are contributing to cumulative growth. There's a 'perfect storm' of reasons why this is so: exporting agricultural produce essentially means, okay, we'll sell these bananas for those US dollars, with which we'll buy Western industrial products. In other words: your industries and service sectors remain permanently unable to grow because your domestic consumers keep buying from overseas (it is for this exact reason that many oil exporters remain infrastructurally poor despite hilariously high GDP numbers).
Labor-intensive agriculture doesn't result in human capital accumulation. Build a factory and after ten years you've got a couple thousand semiskilled factory workers to do something with. Build a farm and after ten years you've still got unskilled laborers, same as before - the fertilizers and Green Revolution techniques are all imported from richer nations, after all. It doesn't lead anywhere.
The margins in agriculture are crappy: unlike oil, farming is extremely competitive and margins are hence lean, even with massive subsidies. Purchases of consumer goods and investments in the future (college educations, for instance) remain low, and these are where all the shiny growth numbers come from.
And agriculture means your population is spread out - making it difficult to provide schools, public housing, water/electricity/telecom infrastructure, hospitals. Family planning remains nonexistent and population growth keeps accelerating to keep up with what little GDP growth that does happen. In short: everyone remains poor, generation after generation.
Agriculture is not the route to accelerating growth. Industrialization is the route to accelerating growth, preferably export-led industrialization. Foreign subsidies of agricultural imports make the transition sharper and more painful, but they also make the transition dramatically faster.
It's also worth remembering that we are discussing exports - the link between American subsidies and third world domestic economies - meaning that domestic production for domestic consumption generally remains unaffected (to see why, think about exchange rates; this remains true even if exchange rates are fixed). A subsidy on exports is a subsidy on imports. What are Americans buying from the third world?
Do explain.
I'm a bit confused by this. If America sells corn to Mexico at an astoundingly low rate (due to US Government subsidies), undercutting Mexican farmers and thus putting them out of a job, how does that leave the Mexico's domestic production and consumption unaffected?
The film also explores a number of Mexican farmers who illegally immigrate to the US since farming in Mexico is no longer profitable. Many of them work for virtually nothing and it strongly implies that the companies they work for have deals with local authorities that cause 10-15 workers to be deported every week while the others go untouched. This preserves the image of law and order while not harming the productivity of these farms.
I always criticized people who refused to eat GM food because it was "bad for them".
This was because I assumed GM food's had been genetically modified to be more resistant to bugs, or larger, or other desirable traits. It turns out I was wrong. Foods are modified primarily to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides (or the main marketed ones at least).
GM foods go hand in hand with pesticide and herbicide use.
So I agree, Monsanto is not doing what I had hoped to see from genetics, they don't care about farmers, food or the environment, only about selling as much overpriced GM seed and pesticide as possible.
While I would tend to agree with you when it comes to those societies where massive industrialization sans agriculture is possible due to a relatively stable underlying culture, I think where it falls apart is Africa. It simply isn't teneble for them to engage in an accelerated industrialization sans agriculture I don't think. It would likely require foreign capital investment which companies aren't going to do due to risk. So in that case, I think the American agricultural subsidies (as well as aid) are actively harmful. They prevent a nascent market from emerging where there otherwise might be one. But feel free to counterdict this, I'll readily admit I haven't done a ton of research into it.
Also, the family farmer isn't much more noble than big bad Monsanto. As a voting demographic they support all the rent seeking behavior that the people on this forum deplore. So they are culpable for things being the way they are. They hold a tremendous amount of sway in rural agricultural areas, and by extension on congressmen from states with large rural areas.
I was referring to Goumindong's allusion to agricultural production intended to feed the domestic population alone - subsistence-level agriculture, in short. This is more of an African than Mexican problem, I wager. In this case, even if America tried to sell corn to such farmers, the farmers won't have enough US dollars to buy it. You need to export to be able to buy imports. The domestic producers are only undercut if the corn is being distributed for free, which is not happening.
In retrospect I should have made this clearer, though. Sorry. :?
As for Mexico, well, Mexican corn farmers go out of a job, while all of Mexico's other export industries cheer them on. The United States is subsidising them now, after all ("a subsidy on exports is a..." you get the idea). Apparently Mexico's GDP is only 3.9% agriculture, in any case.
To deal with the associated unemployment it is usually hoped that industries or other agricultural products will step up - driven by increased exports; Mexico has a comparative advantage in "labor-intensive crops such as fruits, nuts, vegetables, coffee and sugar cane", Wikipedia tells me - which might not happen due to structural problems like urban crime or badly-designed protectionism. Which brings us to this:
In which case I say that there are massive structural economic problems in Mexico, and you're blaming the wrong target. An economy which cannot provide jobs that are better than risking death and injury sneaking into the United States has much bigger problems than the difficulties of one industry.
I reiterate again that I'm not supporting this policy, but I want to point out that the costs are borne primarily by the US, not the third world, particularly in the long run.
Turns out Monsanto, who was involved with the milk, also happened to own a nice chunk of their network. Assholes.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
So...the answer is to destroy Iowa?
Most margarines have a tiny amount of trans-fats, while replacing a whole lot of saturated fat with unsaturated fat, which is better for you. Last time I checked I was not able to find any health studies that concluded that margarine was actually worse for you than butter.
Also, I do believe the term "Frankenfoods" refers to GM food only.
I say we take off and nuke Iowa from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Or we could just decide to hold the Iowa Caucus somewhere besides Iowa.
makes me wonder if monsanto would to try to limit the play this movie gets, or if they already have
when does this movie come out anyway?
I know this is pretty much taking capitalism out of the equation, which I'll surely get shit on for, but shouldn't we be trying to eventually come to a plateau in food production, instead of making more and more food, destroying more and more of the world?
Available food only places an upper limit on population as long that the people who are already born can't get food and are hence dying; obviously, this is no longer the limiting factor for much of the world. Family planning and such; people choose not to have children. This is not something other species do.
Wait, how is it not a limiting factor for much of the world? I'm not saying that family planning/birth control aren't going to help, but if there's only so much food, there can only be so many people.
Yes, food sets an upper limit, but in many rich nations there are fewer people than the amount of food available can support. Population size is instead set by other factors, like parents thinking: how many children can I afford to send to college? instead of: how many children can I afford to feed? And the first limit is much more restrictive than the second.
Make the the Hawaii Caucus.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, when you sell anything, and get more money for it and are able to save or spend that money[and by extension other people are able to save or spend that money], that is growth and when it continues to happen because you can expand your production due to the increased amount of capital coming into the area, its cumulative.
So short answer, yes it fucking works like that. What do you think that people in third would nations would just burn the extra money they made from exporting food rather than buying fertilizer, planting nitrogen fixing trees, building irrigation, and buying industrial equipment?
Good fucking lord no. Comparative advantages take into account structural problems like ubran crime... which should have no effect on labor intensive crops in the first place. And protectionism benefits the industries protected and the local economy in general[so long as you don't count it as a factor for foreign protectionism] The things that stop Mexico from exporting these things is that U.S. protectionist policies. Otherwise known as sugar subsidies and tariffs.
NO NO NO NO. Mexican consumers cheer them on, not Mexico's exports. That shit does nothing to Mexico's exports except make all the people who would have been making and exporting corn maxing and exporting something else(or doing nothing), possibly driving down prices as competition increases(though it would be maginal in most cases).
The only people who will explicitly gain from this[aside from consumers] are the people in whatever industry that has the corn producers subsidized out of.(and even then, probably only marginally) and the people getting subsidized.
This is the stupidest thing i have ever read. ALL LABOR results in capital accumulation so long as the wages for that labor minus the consumption of the producer is greater than their capital depreciation. And just so everyone is abundantly clear about what happens when the U.S. subsidizes agricultural products and imposes tariffs on their import. The prices of the good goes down, reducing the wages of the people in question, necessarily negatively impacting their capital accumulation rate[/b]
Earlier i said that something was the stupidest thing i have ever read. I take that back. The subsidy may reduce nominal prices of some incoming goods[as foreign producers shift into more competitive markets], but since it requires taxing to do so, real prices rise.
Lets be absolutely clear here. For the most part, when you subsidize a good that does not have external benefits associated with it, everyone loses except the people consuming that good, and the people producing that good. Everyone else pays for it in some way.
Except in this case there are external costs associated with it, so the consumers don't even benefit[in the absence of corn subsidies food in general would be more expensive for U.S. consumers, but it would be better for us and non corn products would be cheaper than they are now.] which just means that everyone is fucked except the corn lobby. The only question is "how fucked?" and the answer is "its third world nations that pay for it most"
Well, besides the cultural norm spreading there is this little thing called "the global market" where people can buy and sell all sorts of goods. And when you change the prices of those goods the buying habits of the people will change... And the United States is changing the prices of those goods...
How much might be an argument to make, but that they've been distorted it is not even a question.
Dude, chill. Anyway...
Wow, that was a very confused view of growth. Um. Where do I start.
I'll try and pick apart your core misconceptions and see if I can get get through to you. I'll start with the "stupidest things you've ever read":
Uh, no. Your definition of capital is ripped from accounting; you need the one from development econ. Human capital is the potential productivity of labor, and labor-intensive agriculture doesn't make labor more productive, principally because all the interesting methods to grow crops using an endless amount of human muscle were already discovered a long time ago.
You're thinking of this from the wrong perspective. It is true from the perspective of an individual worker that all work makes him richer, less his 'depreciation' due to age or whatever. This is why this definition is used in finance and corporate accounting. But as far economics goes, we are not thinking of a given individual worker but the average worker for that industry, and a thousand workers who turn 30 with a tidy pile of savings to invest* - individual capital - merely means that a thousand fresh workers turn 18 and join the industry. Average human capital doesn't change, and doesn't accumulate.
The only way to increase (economic) human capital is education and other such social conditions: career training, work experience, basic healthcare. Work experience is why developing countries grant tax holidays; it makes initial investment profitable, and a few thousand workers get to learn the ropes; thereafter labor productivity for that industry will have risen enough to make it profitable even under tax. But labor-intensive agriculture doesn't benefit from this; it is, virtually by definition, focused on cheap unskilled labor. Ten years later you just have essentially the same workforce.
* It might be tempting to suggest that this is where cumulative investment comes from, but this doesn't work, either - history demonstrates that a multitude of factors nullify this effect. Population growth outpaces such savings, and the margins of labor-intensive agriculture are too lean for workers to have a substantial sum to put away anyway. See my original post.
Yeah, no.
Outline of the subsidy/tariff effect: the mechanism is the exchange rate* - subsidizing an export means that more people want your currency to buy that export. The value of your currency rises. Imports therefore become that much cheaper to your domestic consumers: a de facto subsidy. That's it. Hence: a subsidy on exports is a subsidy on imports, there is no 'may' in it. Forex markets are liquid enough to ensure that this is always the case.
As for tax... I'll await your brilliant illustration of why tax leads a rise in the aggregate real price level (protip: it does not). Aggregate, mind you. I hope you're not going to commit that macro/micro error again (yes a tax will increase the real price of one good. This is not the real price level).
* actually it applies even with a fixed exchange rate, in which case it just works through the money supply instead. Identical effect.
Astonishingly, I agree it's distorted. I however think you're being a pedantic ass by pretending that this distortion of global dietary habits is significant at any economic level - "How much" is precisely the point. The United States may be a superpower, but it's not that large, thanks - that there are 95% percent of us on Earth elsewhere means that the global market distortion will have to be pretty damn big to shift global habits. Subsidies are offset partially by shifts in the exchange rate (see: above), among other factors. e.g., the United States's subsidy on corn is enough to shift the US sweetener market towards corn syrup, but it hasn't brought the rest of the world with it.
I don't think you understand what is happening here. You are literally claiming that people with more money cannot possibly invest it in anything. Do you understand how retarded that is?
Besides the obvious problems that the more effective labor techniques, like crop rotation, nitrogen based fertilizers and nitrogen fixing trees have been discovered does not meant that people have the available resources to USE them, because the fertilizer is too expensive for them to use because crop prices are so low... because of agriculture subsidies in developed nations and tariffs to importing[among other things, like necessary consumption levels].
Maybe you don't get what is happening but the subsidies for U.S. corn producers lowers the margins for labor intensive agriculture where they would otherwise have a comparative advantage
A tax, an income tax, reduces incomes. REAL price level(for consumers) is normal to incomes. In short, the tax is on everything and as such all prices rise because it increases the real price of the one good that was taxed increased, which was everything.[there are two ways to see it, either incomes were reduced, which increases the price level on everything(I.E. purchasing power went down), or everything was taxed, which increases the price level on everything]
There are 95% of you, but you don't matter as much. The IMF estimates that the United States was 23.4% of WORLD GDP in 2008, combined with the EU, which is another massive agriculture subsidizer we make up half of the worlds GDP. The U.S. alone had roughly 126 billion in agriculture of various sorts during that time. This meant that the U.S. alone made more food than everything any non-oil producing African nation made. The EU had roughly 380 billion in agriculture production. [And if a simple quote from Wikipedia will suffice(cited from the NAO, but the link is dead) "The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a system of European Union agricultural subsidies and programs. It represents 48% of the EU's budget, €49.8 billion in 2006 (up from €48.5 billion in 2005)."] To put this in perspective, combined, the EU and U.S. subsidizes agriculture to the effect of a greater amount of raw money than the GDP of the bottom 117 nations.
No, i am sure the price level set by that market means nothing
Look, Jeffery Sachs is not a fringe economist. And while his prescription also calls for capital infusions via direct aid packages that does not mean that the subsidy and tariff effects are not large and important.
See also: Joseph Stiglitz for more information about the negative externalities imposed on developing nations due to these policies.
Only if demand for your product is elastic(or if there were zero exports of the good before the subsidy which is not a behavior that is typically seen). If its inelastic demand for your currency would actually drop(since the increase in exports would be made up for by the lower prices). Are these foods really elastic goods?
edit: The survey says no, probably not [except for a very few nations for beverages and cigarettes]. This means that the quantity increases will not offset the price reductions and the demand for the currency will go down.
edit: I know its handy to assume infinite elasticity for world imports and purchases for looking at tariff and subsidy effects, but the world can only work like that as an approximation for what domestic markets see, it does not work like that when you're talking about the entire world(if you were looking for an easy approximation you would set domestic production as perfectly elastic and then look at your revenues to check for currency demand based on world demand rates). And it certainly does not work like that when you're talking about so much raw volume of the market.
You are still failing to grasp the difference between an individual's household capital and national aggregate capital, never mind the difference between human and other types of capital. I am not claiming that people with more money cannot invest it in the future: this is something that individual households do, but it doesn't apply to national aggregates. You're committing a fallacy of composition.
You seem to have read Sach's The End of Poverty, so I'll pick an example from there and try to explain this as patiently as I can.
All this is right - for that household. However, from a national-growth perspective, all it has done is outbid another household for that livestock. National output does not change. You're just swapping cows from one farm to the other.
The only way to affect national output is to argue: perhaps this household is better than that household at extracting output from this livestock (returns to specialization, etc. etc.). However, like I pointed out earlier, labor-intensive agriculture is very bad at providing such returns: it is, by definition, reliant on cheap unskilled labor rather than capital.
To reiterate: labor does not bring national growth. Increasing the productivity of said labor brings national growth.
If only development economics was so simple - we could just hand out loans and everyone would switch to capital-intensive agriculture? Right? They're only not switching because they can't afford to switch?
No. They're using labor-intensive agriculture because domestic labor is cheap, cheaper than using capital-intensive methods. That's it. There are these things called loans which allow people to buy capital if they can get profit out of it; even if individual farmers cannot get a loan at a decent rate (due to instability, lack of collateral, whatever), you can't plausibly argue that giant US-based multinational corporations can't get such loans, and these MNCs grow numerous crops across the third world.
Once you grasp this point, it should be obvious the tariff argument is fallacious: if capital-intensive agriculture were more cost-effective than labor-intensive methods under no subsidies and tariffs, it's still going to be more cost effective than labor under some subsidies and tariffs. It may be that both become unprofitable, but you're making the o_O assertion that tariffs make one physical method more cost-effective than the other. Uh, no. The relevant differences between the third and first world is in infrastructural and human capital: that unskilled labor is cheaper in the third than first, and skilled relatively more expensive in the third than first, and the prerequisite infrastructure (highways, electricity, fuel) for switching to machinery doesn't yet exist. These obviously change relative real costs. Subsidies and tariffs don't. o_O
Yes. So? The subsidy provides more benefits to the average thirdworlder than losses. I did already say that corn farmers elsewhere will go out of a job.
Regardless, the individual laborer's share of profit, even without the distortion imposed by subsidies, is already marginal - simply because there is a lot of such labor.
... did you miss your macroeconomics lectures? You're committing the fallacy of composition everywhere. This is a pretty basic macroeconomic concept.
Tax is spent - in this case, on a subsidy (you're the one who invoked equivalence to begin with, so I'm going to assume it holds). Stop looking at individual households and follow the money. If I take a dollar from everyone else, everyone else's income decreases, but now I have a lot of dollars: there is no change in the general level of real income. While very many people now have a decreased income, I must by definition now have a much larger income, large enough to offset everyone else's impact on the real price level: where else would the dollars go?
This is a simple accounting identity - under the equivalence of tax and spending, it is flatly not possible for a tax to change the real price level or the real income level. A tax imposes exactly two effects: a wealth transfer (from everyone else to corn farmers) and a deadweight loss (market distortion). Neither of these change real prices nor incomes.
I'm happy that you're reading economics books, but you seem to be reading only the popular texts and hence walking away with a bizarre misunderstanding of the underlying theory. I'll engage with your assertions about the finer points of international trade after you've corrected your core misconceptions; otherwise, I don't think I can get very far!
Are you really arguing that export demand is inelastic and then saying that subsidized cheap American corn is flooding the third world? O_o Can you even say that with a straight face?
Look, elasticity of global demand is irrelevant. We're talking law of one price, here - America is not the sole exporter of corn. It doesn't matter whether the global demand is inelastic; if the US makes US corn cheaper, then countries which would otherwise import Mexican corn, import US corn, and keep doing so until nobody else sells corn, or export demand has risen until prices equalise again - and, again, the US is not the sole exporter of corn, so we can see that export demand is elastic. It is for this reason that elasticity is taken as given: it's pretty dang obvious!
So now you're saying that if individuals have more money they can invest it, but if you add all of those increases together you don't get an increase in capital.
By what magical system does 1+1 = 0?
You're also failing to understand that the only one harping about human capital is you, people with more money can invest it wherever they need to. If the prices for their goods are higher they will have more money.
edit: look, no one is treating national economies as firms. All they're saying is that an increase in prices for export goods in developed nations will increase the production that those nations. Its not "an increase in prices for one firm in the nation" its not "an increase in capital for one firm in the nation" its "when prices rise the producers who attain those price increases reap the benefits" This is a macro level examination with a micro level explanation because some people do not seem to realize that our subsidies which reduce world prices for food harm developing nations which would otherwise be making and selling food on the world market but have no capital with which to develop other industries[which are also typically highly tariff protected, E.G. Textiles in Europe] that would be the typical response to the loss of a competitive advantage in a particular field.
You realize that you just claimed trade was a zero sum game right? You are overlooking the fact that the single person example is not the only change that is happening, its an example of the change for the individual that makes up the aggregate change of increased production.
P.S. you realize that he was talking about increasing the productivity of said labor right?
Did anything say anything about loans? A: No, they didn't
Good lord no. I never claimed anything of the sort. We have two situations currently working. 1. Labor intensive farming has a competitive advantage in these areas 2. this competitive advantage is negated by tariffs.
Labor or capital intensive farming are not made worse or better in relation to each other, labor intensive farming is already advantaged over capital intensive farming. Tariffs and subsidies stop that labor intensive farming from being as profitable[or happening as widely as it otherwise would].
You're entirely rejecting the idea that increased prices will increase quantity produced and its baffling me why anyone in their right mind would do this.
This is not true. It only provides more benefits when they have income that isn't largely derived from affected industries. All third world farmers are out of jobs when people switch to cheaper corn. Or have you forgotten the relations of substitutes as you've forgotten the rest of the economic relationships?
But it can always be more or less marginal, and the firms production may not be[where its likely that no mnc will have a competitive advantage] Sweet, so just give all the money to me instead of the corn producers and the general price level won't change!
A: Yes, it will, you've just shifted the price level for different people in the economy, lowering it for me and raising it for everyone else, saying "but corn producers have more money" is disingenuous. We covered this when I said "the price of corn will go down but the price of everything else will go up" Which you seemed to take exception with
Again, as explained, you only get a benefit if what you're subsidizing has external benefits.
Edit: And of course this happens whether or not you actually tax in order to support your subsidy, due to inflationary effects of money supply increases.
Just pointing you to the stuff you're more likely to understand
The effect of multiple importations is not created by high state product elasticities(I.E. demand for a specific product from a specific state). You also seem to ignore the fact that elasticities are relative to the quantity produced. Such, it is very easy for elasticity for U.S. corn exports to be inelastic while state product elasticity for a much smaller nation to be highly elastic. This is especially true for inelastic world demand.
E.G. lets say that world demand elasticity is 0 and the U.S. makes 50 units of corn/year. Mexico by contrast makes 25. Now lets say that price changes 10% and people switch to Mexican corn. World demand is inelastic so they're still going to buy a total of 75 units of corn. But if 3 units from the U.S. are reduced and 3 units from Mexico are increased then Mexican elasticity is 1.27and U.S. elasticity is .512.
As you can see with this simplification, even when world demand is perfectly inelastic the elasticities between the various products will be relative to the size of the production they're dealing with, such its quite possible that world demand is inelastic and the demand for U.S. corn is inelastic while U.S. corn production and subsidies unduly damage other export communities without increasing the demand for U.S. dollars. In fact, it is more likely that the high quantity production would be inelastic while low quantity production elastic in a situation with general inelasticity. The world is not a perfectly competitive market where everyone has as equal share of production. Stop treating it like it is.
It is also quite possible that these scenarios are damaging for other states, especially when their prime export is agricultural goods, since an import that comes in cheaper doesn't much matter when their national income is reduced more due the reduction in exports
You mean invite the dark prince Lucifer into their souls and jeopardize the health of the planet's population for the sake of sustaining "the Company"?
I assume that depends on how much waste could be used as natural fertilizer, which in turn depends on what's being fed to the animals. Free range cows that eat grass produce waste that goes directly back into the grass, restocking their own food supply without producing major runoff.
Waste runoff, as far as I know, didn't become a major problem until mass farms with corn based diets sprung up.