Saturday, December 13, 2008

Tobacco Program Aided Small Farmers

The different farm programs are just that: different. So you can't take results from one and apply them to another. But a post mortem on the now defunct tobacco quota program suggests it, at least, helped small farmers. We didn't run parallel tests, but looking at what happened after the program ended is suggestive.

Washington Times has a story on tobacco growing in the U.S as of now. When the program ended, many small farms went out of business, at least out of tobacco, to be replaced by fewer bigger growers. There also may have been an impact on smoking--the price has gone up so smoking has gone down. The program also operated as a price umbrella for developing countries, which could undercut US on price. Now we're exporting more.

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