this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Norway fucked up on eggs this year. They feared overproduction, so they made a subsidy for egg producers not producing.... resulting in an egg shortage this Easter.
https://euroweeklynews.com/2024/03/30/scramble-for-eggs-norway-face-easter-egg-shortage/
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They...feared overproduction?
Were they worried about depleting resources or something?
they were worried about producing too much, the price of eggs collapsing, the market demand being so low they couldn't move product, and thus, losing money. It's a big problem with industrialized farming. Localized farming helps to solve this issue.
Sure but why not just give the farmers what they needed and pickle the extra or something?
i mean, that's an option. Although after having done some reading, it seems like this was more in cohorts with like a million chickens being killed due to swine flue or whatever the fuck happens in industrial bird farming.
Either way, industrial farming is just not a very good system at handling anything even remotely shenanigan worthy.
Yeah chickens dying or quarantine concerns would be real shit, but 'concerns of overproduction' when a natural resource isn't being wasted (the chickens were still being kept alive, right?) Is just so dumb to me.
it sounds dumb, but it happens. Apple farmers in rural america were about to lose their shit after producing way too many apples. The state of west virginia, iirc decided to buyback all of the excess. And donated it to foodbanks or something.
It's literally lost revenue for large scale farming. That's just how shitty it is.
Capitalist nonsense, and good on west Virginia for doing basically the right thing.
pretty much
I wrote a lengthy reply to a similar question:
https://feddit.dk/comment/7386845
Got it, dumb capitalist nonsense.
Flattening the territory to fit the map.
Spot on.
How is a government subsidy "dumb capitalist nonsense"? The capitalist model would be for a single entity to buy all the small farms that can't stay in business during volatile market periods and monopolize the market entirely, with zero care to animal welfare, food safety, and customer prices (other than to maximize profits). Your comment is just just lazy "muh capitalism bad".
Previous poster might be spamming his opinion, but in this case he's right.
In this particular case the government is financing capitalists by giving them money to keep capitalising on something they couldn't otherwise capitalize on. This happens on an otherwise free market, just to add.
What they should have done is to lower the purchase tax on domestic eggs. That would benefit both Norwegian consumers and also Norwegian egg producers.
Norway already has several sales tax brackets to do just this. F.i. they did it to hotels, going from 25% to 6% after the COVID pandemics for the benefit of both hotels and guests.
Subsidy for... . . .
Did United Russia take over Norway?
Why is overproduction a bad thing? Doesn't everyone just get cheaper food as a result?
It seems that the Norwegian egg-business is always in trouble somehow. Just like farmers elsewhere complaining about the weather, it's an endless moaning.
EU is pushing for a shorter shelf-life on eggs to be able to make a more rapid response against salmonella, and while Norway isn't in EU and generally don't have the salmonella issue, they still have to trade with EU. Fear of chicken flu is also lowering the demand for eggs.
Overproduction is bad because it can make the price go so low that it doesn't make sense for anyone to do. Especially in a country like Norway where the cost of living is extremely high. They simply can't compete, so the state offers money to keep the businesses closed while the free market can't pay them, and to keep domestic production from competing too much internally.
It's not uncommon to see this situation in EU, where it is sometimes possible to buy a plot of agricultural land and do nothing with it only to get paid by EU for leaving the land alone. The EU is a trade union, so the main purpose internally is to direct the trades to those who can do it best and cheapest within the borders. It's a good thing though. In the 1990s there was a massive overproduction of all kinds of foods that would eventually rot up in stocks all over Europe. Overproduction is a cost if the goods cannot be sold.
Norwegian eggs are not exactly a big business, but I do believe it's a net export for them, so I think the subsidy is made to keep the egg producers in business even if the export is lowering for different reasons. If they didn't pay chicken producers not to produce, the producers would have to stop production due to low revenue from temporarily missed sales and eventually leaving Norway without a realistic capability of producing for their own market.
Anyway, it backfired at the Easter peak demand. It may still make sense later.