> Private enterprise handles food just fine despite substantial logistic challenges.
I don't know about Australia, but in the US food is propped up by massive taxpayer subsidy and relies on an undocumented immigrant workforce paid low wages with no recourse against employer abuse.
>You can buy USA produce, which is produced under better conditions.
Just because it's produced in USA doesn't mean it has better conditions. As an example: Think of an illegal immigrant, they'll get paid lower than minimum wage since the patron is having the risk of a fine or something, plus they don't speak the language or simply don't know their rights.
To some this is still better than back at home, and some who do it to send money back home still get to send more than if they lived in their country, through exchange rates.
There was a documentary thing about this, someone who got paid cents for each bucket full of tomatoes they picked. I can't find it right now.
> Or worse, that the private sector somehow is where the challenge is. Maybe where you can get richer, but look at the department of agriculture or any other major government institution. $150b in budget and 100k employees. You find me a private company with similar size and a mission to feed 380M people.
I'm off on a tangent here...but is it really the responsibility of the department of agriculture to feed 380 million people? What did people do before the creation of the department of agriculture? :-)
> Most of the food comes from about 20% of the farms; the rest are marginal producers. Farming is doing fine; it just doesn't take many people.
Better food is more labor-intensive. The best-tasting eggs I've ever bought were from a grass-fed beef farmer. He'd rotate his cattle through the pastures, and move the chickens to where the cattle had been previously. The chickens would stomp through the cow waste, and eat all the bugs.
food scarcity in America is not a problem.
Then you have logistical challenge to transfer this food to other region and efficiently distribute it. Then you have financial problem who will pay for all of this.
> Nobody forced the farmers to become reliant on migrant workers though.
Not strictly true in a competative market that races for the lowest possible cost. It's the toxic company culture mentality that in this case, the shareholders are the customers and they want to have their cheap food.
Hence many farmers been squeezed via large corporations and dairy farmers and many others operate upon margins that are just insane and unsustainable that many end up producing at a loss overall.
> Why would it be better for the government to provide this than the existing food distribution and supply chain?
It probably isn't, but one possibility is that the government would be such a huge customer, that they have significant negotiating power. Per-unit costs would consequently be much lower.
> Not sure what you mean by that. The US is a net food exporter by more than 70 million metric tons.
you're right, http://www.fdaimports.com/blog/how-much-of-u-s-food-is-impor... but it doesn't change the matter of concern: what happens to those other countries' economic development when a large percentage of their workforce is rapidly made non-existent.
> Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.
Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).
> you can’t really get high quality food outside a lot of sourcing and effort
To be fair, this is very dependent upon the region you live in. I live in a suburban area bordering on farmland, and so I can get piles of really good quality foods at my local farmer's market every weekend. There's farms naturally raising grass fed beef, as well. And a couple people that go out to the Pacific and catch fish and then sell it at the same farmer's market.
I imagine that's a bit of a luxury in some places, for sure, but I'd bet it's not that uncommon, either.
> We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed.
True, but that's more an economic and political problem than one of food production. Making farmers more dependent on large corporations is not going to fix their economic problems.
> but I can never quite get over how ridiculously cheap food is in the US.
Keep in mind there's a LOT of subsidies for farmers and livestock. Part of the price is because it's baked into our taxes.
Granted, we also have more than 900 million acres of farm land. That's more than 1.4 million square miles. For perspective only 6 countries are larger than that in total land area (7 if you include the U.S.)
I don't know about Australia, but in the US food is propped up by massive taxpayer subsidy and relies on an undocumented immigrant workforce paid low wages with no recourse against employer abuse.
reply