About Increasing Trade and Saving American Agriculture

I wrote a post  recently in which I complained that  USDA Secretary Vilsack's proposals for helping "American farmers" did a poor job of differentiating small farmers from big ag, and that some of the proposals seemed to be helping the small farmers while others (like the push for more exports) clearly favored the big guys. I wrote another post in which I talked about the danger of farm subsidies relative to honest pricing of goods.

An article over at Civil Eats goes into greater detail on these issues and discusses how they're interconnected. The author proposes not only that trade won't help America's small farmers, but that exporting the industrially produced and artificially cheap goods produced under our big ag, subsidy system is detrimental to foreign economies, limits the markets available to our goods, and even harms biodiversity worldwide.

Not an apolitical article, but raises interesting points, so worth reading.

UPDATE:
An additional article, with more info on agricultural policy's trade implications as well as links to more in depth info for the curious. Courtesy of the The US Agricultural and Food Law and Policy Blog.