In many cases, it became an issues of competing against foreign produced crops. In others, some stuff folks just won’t bother buying if they cost more.
The real staples of our food are all mechanically harvested. You don’t hire laborers to pick wheat or corn. You how them to pick fruit and stuff that is harder to harvest with machines.
In many cases in the western US, even when farm owners have jacked their wages up to just break even at the market price, they still couldn’t get enough workers, and crops were rotting in the fields. The farmers tried to pay as much as they could, but there just weren’t enough people willing to do the work, and the farmers took even bigger losses.
I think people would just stop buying, or stop being able to buy.
I think that @Sharpe’s point is that if people aren’t willing to do the work, then they aren’t being offered market wages, and farmers should pay more. If this is the case, can non-mechanized/subsidized farmers afford to stay in business?
Well, somebody has to grow the food, no? If groceries became twice as expensive and there were nobody undercutting those prices, what could buyers do but pay it? Ok, I guess gardening might become everyone’s new favorite hobby.
It’s much more complicated than that. There are other suppliers of fresh produce (e.g., Mexico, Canada, South America). There are other forms (e.g., canned, frozen). People could eat less produce. If you doubled or tripled the cost of produce, there’s no way that people would simply keep buying at the same volume.
I highly suspect the economic impact of removing the illegal immigrant labor pool would be extremely complex and disruptive. Whether the result would ultimately be a net good would be extremely subjective and policy driven. Entire business sectors would shrink and others would grow.
I think Sharpe’s comments about increasing the legal immigration limits, coupled with employer-side enforcement, is the most reasonable thing to do. The reality is that most economies need a body of cheap labor. Employers would, obviously, resist that.
Plus, farms in Central America would make more profit wages and fewer people would then try to migrate to the US. Except that a lot of these Central American countries are pretty nasty to citizens.
I guess farming produce is like making tennis shoes? We can do it here, but labor is so much cheaper offshore the shoes can be made cheaper there and imported? Same with food if we enforce laws that will result in higher wages for farm workers?
I suspect we are just 10-20 years away from robot farming that will be able to harvest the kind of produce now that can only be harvested by humans.
Do you know how much food would have to go up in order to squeeze the middle-class… a lot. Other countries might spend around 40-50% of their income on food and the middle here is under 20%, and that has been going down, according to the USDA. Generations before us spent more on food in percentage of income. We should be able to afford it to go up, and yes, maybe some eating habits might shift… so what? It wouldn’t be the first time.
Maybe the percentage spent on food has gone down, but unfortunately the middle class had been getting relentlessly squeezed in other areas for decades (medical care, rising cost of living with housing, lost benefits, etc). There’s a lot of people barely clinging on by their fingertips and a jump in food prices will absolutely be felt.
And you say “maybe some eating habits might shift, so what?”. We’re already dealing with the issue of poor diet, especially among the poor. Rising costs of produce has the potential to make the even worse, creating even more health problems.
I’m not making an argument against paying better wages to ag workers, by the way. Just responding to the “no big deal” on rising food costs and the impact it would have on people.
I’d take issue with that too, if I was referencing the poor, but I’m not. I am specifically responding to the idea that the middle class would be squeezed. If someone in the middle class is eating poorly, it’s not due to to their inability to pay for better food. They’re in the middle class, and the percentage of their income going for food is better than it’s been for at least a few generations before. The poor are a different matter, and subsidizing their income to get access to better food has been largely successful, for those who participate.
Just FYI, the source for this isn’t Gallup, they are just reprinting the numbers the BLS gives out. You can go there and get the official government unemployment rates however you want, including the U-6 which includes underemployed. There are more than a handful of these numbers if I remember correctly. My favorite source to graph them is FRED which is a service of the federal reserve which offers a ton of economic stats that you can graph and compare and download.
Yes, and it’s that sort of thing I was referring to. If someone is comfortably middle class then yeah, they can probably afford to spend more money on food. But people are already getting squeezed out, a spike in food prices is just going to push more out of that category (not that the categorization itself is important, but you know what I mean). It also might mean more “middle class” families start eating poor nutrition as they’re priced out of healthy produce and other foodstuffs, further compounding our problems.
