Why New Zealanders don't like subsidies.

1. Resentment among farmers, some of whom will inevitably feel that subsidies are applied unfairly.
2. Resentment among non farmers, who pay for the system once in the form of taxes and a second time in the form of higher food prices.
3. The encouragement of overproduction, which then drives down the prices and requires more subsidization of farmers income.
4. The related encouragement to farm marginal lands, with resulting environmental degradation.
5. The fact that most subsidy money passes quickly from farmers to farm suppliers, processors, and other related sectors, again negating the intended affect of supporting farmers.
6. Additional market distortions, such as the inflation of land values based on production incentives or cheap loans.
7. Various bureaucratic insanities, such as paying farmers to install conservation measures like hedgerows and wetlands- after having paid to rip them out a generation ago. While those farmers who have maintained such landscapes and wildlife features all along get nothing.

Removing subsidies, on the other hand, forces farmers and farm related industries to become more efficient, to diversify, to follow and anticipate the market. It gives farmers more independence, and gains them more respect. it leaves more government money to pay for other types of social services, like education and health care.

form Laura Sayre's "Farming without subsidies? Lessons from New Zealand," The New Farm, 2003