Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure if subsidizing a handful of industries avoids the problem of cost imbalances when trading globally. Say we subsidize corn because otherwise our corn industry would be decimated by cheap labor overseas. We successfully walled off one industry, but that cheaper foreign labor is still available for other production. Maybe workers that would be paid overseas to grow corn are instead paid to produce cheape…
I doubt it's expected to be holistic, and there's not much point tariffing a commodity you don't have a viable alternative locally such as oil; Autarky is unlikely to viable in the long run. Though chemical fertilizer is likely a common weak point for food security with many countries. But this is not a new problem, the US pacific island grab in the 1800s to source Guano shows how regenerating soil macro nutrients ha…
To clarify, I don't recall if that was actually kep in country or the net import/export comparison, we may have been making enough to cover something like 90% but exporting that overseas.
Anyway, 100% agree fertilizer has been a problem for a long time. As long as we treat food production as an broken loop where farms are dependant on outside resources rather than building sustainable farming systems we'll always be stuck trying to steal someone else's nutrients in the form of fertilizer.