Steve wrote: "...And as much as I like my year round bounty of fresh
fruits and veggies imported from around the world (with gawd knows how
much inefficiency and product waste/spoilage)"
George Duncan and I were in Sri Lanka in January. We stopped at a
highway produce stand in the interior part of the island. There for
sale were small Red Delicious apples, the type typically seen in our
stores. Those apples were imported from Washington State. Each apple
was priced at the equivalent of 50 cents, about what we pay here. So
how does that work?
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon ("get off my lawn!") but I'd say it
*doesn't*... the illusion that it does is probably hugely implicated in
our current global-scale crises (climate, poverty, pestilence, bad
made-for-TV-movies, and halitosis).
A more direct (less ranty/sociopolitical) answer might be that container
shipping and modern preservation techniques and an imbalance of trade,
and agricultural surpluses resulting from mega-AG in the US probably
help to make this possible. For example, if there is a net trade
surplus in container count going from Sri Lanka (or nearby) to the US,
then filling containers with Red Delish (you said they were small, maybe
sub-par for our self-indulgent markets?) and shipping them back is
somewhere between free and highly subsidized by whatever product
(scarcifying rain-forest hardwoods? Nike Sneakers?) is being shipped
*this* way. I suspect a fully loaded container ship *is* a little
more expensive to push across the Pacific but maybe only by a small
increment?
Then we have the difference in currency/wages/standard of living and in
the US, that $.50 apple would net the seller $.25 or less here, but in
Sri Lanka that might be an hour's wages for the people
unloading/grading/packaging/delivering/retailing in Sri Lanka?
I'm sure someone has studied and written up lots about this somewhere...
maybe a Journalist? Economist? Social Commentarian?
Is this world perhaps on the cusp of a punctuation mark in the
proverbial "punctuated equilibrium"? Will we have something like a
thermal inversion where all these false economies turn back right side
up? Or is this the "curmudgeon" in me thinking it is "wrong-side up".
I suppose there are (Panglossian?) arguments to be made: "all is for the
best" in the "best of all possible worlds
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds>". I hear
this from many of my Trumpian friends (on topics like climate change
denial, misogyny, etc.)
- Steve
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