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Why not?

Hate to say it, but sending food grown in the US (subsidised by US taxpayers) and shipped from the US (on US flagged vessels at great cost) is just about the stupidest thing you can do. It turns most US food aid into a huge subsidy for US farmers and dumps excess production or unsaleable grain on local populations who may not normally even eat those grains. Additionally, as the parent says, it destroys local production. So send money instead! (Bush, would you believe, actually got this one right.)

This is all nothing, though, compared to what the "normal" subsidies do in the first place by making it so developing countries cannot compete.

US subsidised crops and the entire European Common Agricultural Polict (CAP) are all evil things that need to be abolished. Level the playing field - stop subsidising inefficient farmers in US/EU and give producers in countries like Ghana a chance.

And if you don't think this can be done without destroying the US/EU countryside economy or way of life, it's worth reading this article on New Zealand.

Get rid of farm subsidies in the US/EU. Everyone wins.

If products aren't 'worth' what people pay for them, then the whole field of economics is complete nonsense(I will allow that plenty of it is nonsense, but plenty of makes sense too); the value of a product is whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Sure, that number often has little to do with the actual cost of making said product, but that's why trade is so nifty, someone with a lot of potatoes and no salt is willing to trade quite a few potatoes for some salt, and someone with a lot of salt and no potatoes is willing to trade quite a bit of salt for some potatoes, and they both walk away thinking about what a deal they got, especially when potato guy is good and growing potatoes and salt guy is good at mining salt. Your 'require' is simply a euphemism for placing a very high value on the product(i.e., if you require it, you are made so much better off by it that it is, in fact, 'worth' acquiring, even at seemingly obscene prices).

As far as my wandering opinion, as far as I can tell, you are being obtuse, either by purpose or accident. I would in fact, at a given price, prefer secure, cheap, renewable and efficient energy production, but the difference in price that I am willing to pay for those things is very low; my price preference outweighs my feel good about it preference. So I guess I should have said that I care very little where it comes from, but I was going for emphasis or accuracy.

I fail google though, searching for "Netherlands switchgrass" doesn't yield much; there is this article:

http://www.eeci.net/archive/biobase/B10189.html

Which says that it grows ok there and will be neat. There is this pdf:

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/17/16274/kuiper.pdf

which is about bio energy in Europe; it mentions a project, but not anything like a plant. This article:

http://biopact.com/2007/03/disappointing-yields-da mpens.html

talks about costs being higher than previously estimated. Adding 'ethanol' to that search yields this article:

http://cels.uri.edu/news/nSwitchgrass.html

which talks about 'developing enzymes' and ethanol costing $2.70 a gallon(which competes with gasoline sourced at $3.15, that's pretax), but doesn't talk about somebody shipping anything just yet. This article:

http://www.newfarm.org/news/2005/0805/082305/swtic hgrass.shtml

has cellulosic on the verge of the mainstream(yes, it's two years old, but I am somewhat past a 'quick' google at this point). And on and on.

I wish you luck, but I will remain skeptical until somebody stands up and announces that they are producing ethanol that is cheaper than gas, without the benefits of any subsidies whatsoever, because that's what it is going to take for biofuels to work.

And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.

The soil releases an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned each year combined. No till farming in America could take as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking half of all the cars in America off the road. A full 40% of the Earth's arable land is being used for agriculture and most of it is being severely degraded by tillage. Why aren't you people up in arms about that? Hey, burn the f'in farmers right? They're greedy evil bastards.

Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?

Wow, the Sun IS getting hotter, and Earth's temperature correlates directly with it.

And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.

Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?

Check out Cuba, still eating despite U.S. efforts to embargo the population from agricultural products and the Soviet Union collapsing. That is, provided, the U.S. government doesn't block the links:

"After the ending of subsidies from the Soviet Union in 1989, combined with the tightening of the U.S. trade embargo, Cuba was hurting and people were hungry. Output from the Cuban agricultural system, dependent on chemical inputs, subsidized petroleum and Soviet machinery, slowed to a trickle. Cuba, led by Fidel Castro, went into what they called the "Special Period." One of the Special Period initiatives was to develop a nearly completely local and biologically-based food production system. Since then, Cuba has developed the world's most comprehensive modern organic agricultural system and has helped to answer the question "Could organic farming feed the world." "

http://www.newfarm.org/international/features/0703 /cubaconf.shtml

These guys didn't care about the deficit when in one year they gave the Pentagon $74 billion increase, $40 billion ($400 billion/10 years) to create a Medicare senior drug plan, or $12 billion in farm subsidies. Surely we can scrape together $1 billion this year to do some actual science... Incidentally, I happen to be a trickle-down believer, and any money we put towards NASA will only go to help provide jobs for scientists and engineers, something we really need to do to drive off what's left of the Dot-Bomb, and help rekindle the USA's technology drive.

It's wrong.