The Political Economic Myth and Reality of Agricultural Producer Price Support: The 'Agricultural Treadmill' Revisited

The myth of agricultural price policy is that it can counteract the economic effect of the 'agricultural treadmill'. In this paper it is shown that this is not the case. The political economic reality of farm price programs is that a growth in agricultural supply leads to lower levels of price support, all other things bring eqtml. In US wheat and grain policy, the extent of endogenous policy adjustments has been in the same order of magnitude as price changes that would have occurred without price policy.