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There are other solutions. Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a farm. Break the monopolies on food distribution (probably will require the companies to be restructured by law). Create a national food distribution service to compete with the original companies. Provide minimum prices for farmers with the national food distribution service. Put tarifs on imports. Remove all subsidies for food exports (and stop trying to bomb the world food prices in order to offer loans to countries to buy your food exports when they can't afford to compete with their own home grown products).

Ha ha. But seriously, automation and robotics will be much easier to implement.

The biggest problem why extremely cheap food prices are needed is that there is a ton of people that are on minimum wage or below who would not be able to survive otherwise.

If that is to change and ag products be priced in a way that allows fair wages to farm employees and proper treatment to animals, then wages have to be raised across the board and wealth taken from the rich elites and redistributed to the poor.

Yes, easier and also it's not building a socialist economy that would end in just another starvation.

You might have missed it, but it’s capitalism that’s grievously mismanaging this crisis, and everybody suddenly wants a handout. Capitalism when the sun shines, socialism when it rains.

Please leave right-wing propaganda outside of a good discussion. The US-centric view that "socialism" is some sort of great evil is just that: a view that is (mostly) geographically locked and has good examples of working just fine elsewhere.

Agree, automation may indeed be the solution in the long term...but we're not there yet. The solution may indeed require subsidizing wages instead of subsidizing farmers.

> Institute a minimum wage for farm work. Make it attractive to those who would ordinarily choose to work in a factory to work at a farm.

If you have ever done fruit-picking yourself, you would find that it is back-breaking work, and anyone who has been in it for more than a few years develops health problems. A higher minimum wage might attract a few more young people to do it for a season or two to make some quick money, but it won’t make fruit picking an appealing career choice by which a whole industry can be sustained long-term. Any Western European with any sense would prefer to do anything else even if it means less money (or simply live on the dole), and rely on desperate migrants from developing countries to do the hard work.

That is a great point. I actually had in my head more like a union job like in the factories (which can also be back breaking and result in health problems). Of course such a union would almost certainly have to be enforced by law :-) And before people say that I've truly gone socialist, I don't really know if I'm actually in favour of my idea. I'm kind of thinking out loud. I really do think that something is fundamentally broken here and it needs some pretty serious surgury to fix it, though.

Edit: I should note that while I haven't picked fruit, I have cut rice by hand. Would not want to do it for a full time job, but it was considerably easier than I expected.

Minimum wage is a way to perpetuate poverty. It is similar to subsidies.

Manual labour is brutal. No one is going to pick it as a long term stable job. But food is a long term issue. We are always going to eat no matter where we are in our time line. Perhaps that’s why it’s cheap.

Currently food is cheap and food commodities are traded on the exchange. These two things must change.

Another suggestion I have is to subsidize food but for the consumer. Like food stamps. Not farm subsidies. Dairy and grain subsidies have destroyed the sectors. And the environment. They have no choice to keep pumping volume to break even. We have a glut in the market, prices crash and eventually farms shut down..leading to land grabs and shuttering of the sector. The only one making bank is Wall Street and those who sell inputs/machinery to farmers. It’s obscene and perverse.

Coming back to labour in food farms. The only solution is automation and erasure of most tasks involving manual labour. We simply must change the way we farm systems up if it has to be automated and use minimal labour.

If farming is a career, minimum wage is not a sustainable wage. Once upon a time everyone had a farm and grew for themselves and sold/bartered what was in excess. Now population has exploded, farming land has shrunk and food is cheap..but we still use manual labour to grow food to feed 7+ billion people.

Ask yourself this..why isn’t food farming and small farms automated? Simple..because if ag automation steps in, ag machinery will lose their market. They have just miniaturized the machinery used for commodity grain crops but that’s not a good fit.

A corn field gets harvested once a year and a farmer doesn’t have to touch dirt and esp so if he had a Netflix watching air conditioned 250k tractor(that he can’t repair anyways) that is smarter than him and his phone. Available on credit of course. Credit lines make this all possible. Within a generation or two, guaranteed the family will stop farming and start selling the land to developers. That seems to be the gentle way to separate a farmer from his land and vocation.

And who do you think buys all this land? Pension funds, insurance companies, foreign investors from China, Middle East(just like we buy in South America and Canadian pension funds buy into Australian ag land). Farm REITs are owned by insurance companies(hello, prudential!). Harvard wealth fund spinned off a investment company that bought all the farm land in Paso Robles growing corn, alfafa and food crops from small holder farms and converted it into vineyards. But you know what they own that is more valuable than the land itself? Water rights. Because of how fucked up California water politics is, this company has water rights for their vineyards that has led to a moratorium on water usage for food growing family farms for the past six years. If you want to buy a farm in Paso Robles, the prices are diff and drastically so depending on which side of the freeway you are on wrt Harvard’s water sucking vineyard.

Back to small food farms..so the mvp of a 250k smart tractor is a 24k tiny 40HP tractor that does 1/10th of the tasks involved and covers about 1/40th of the farm expense(cost studies available). So the manual costs that is labour from weeding to harvesting to packing takes up 60% of the entire pie. And if it has to be mechanized, economies of scale will fail.

Can you visualize this as numbers? And see why labour costs is killing farming? ESP small acreage farms. What we need is automation and ag robots for SMALL and MEDIUM food producing farms to replace labour.

AI shouldn’t be used to collect data that makes farmers consumers of ag inputs and machinery. Automation should be reduce costs for the farmer not be used to make them spend more money on inputs and machinery. Not surprisingly, the only people interested in investing in Ag automation are ag input companies and ag equipment giants. And for them if it’s not on a commodity crop listed on the exchange they are not interested. Because it’s a market hedging play for them.

>automation and robotics is the only solution.

Maybe to us idealist techies wishing for a fair world, but to the people with big bucks who own and run the show as long as there is someone willing to work for cheaper than it is to develop, buy and run machines it's not worth investing in automation and the world is currently not in short supply of cheap labor unfortunately. There is always a cheaper place with poor oppressed people ripe for exploitation.

Hell, I've worked in tech companies where it was cheaper to send all the mind numbing repetitive stuff nobody wanted to do to some developing nation rather than figuring out how to automate it because management isn't good at thinking long term.

Same in the European tech sector, it's cheaper for companies to invest is visa sponsorships, recruitment fees and relocation packages to import devs from developing nations to put downward pressure on the market and create this image of scarcity than it is to invest in the local talent pool to make wages more competitive.

The irony is that I think some of these "knowledge economy" jobs i.e. doctors and lawyers(and even software engineers) are easier to replace than say nurses(although there is a big conflict going on where lots of nurses actually have more experience and knowledge than doctors) and cleaners.

The idea that creating robots that mimic certain mechanic function is easier than creating something that replaces a person that is essentially an overpaid human dictionary is ludicrous.

But I guess lawyers have better lobbies than cleaners.

Nurses need how many years of school? Lawyers need how many years of school? The harder to replace one is the one who spends more time in school.

As much as we like to think software doesn't need an education, for the overwhelming majority, they spend at least 4 years in University before working in industry. Bootcampers/self-tahght are a small minority of workers.

Lawyers aren’t mere human dictionaries — they have an understanding of the system that is the law and how everything works in that context.

Interacting with a legal system without that domain knowledge leads to Freemen Of The Land, or to thinking that Section 69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 outlaws all sexual contact with humans “because humans are a type of animal”.

What senior lawyers (and senior pharmacists and senior software developers) have is the stuff people mistakenly call “common sense” — a phrase which is only ever used while complaining someone else doesn’t have it, because the knowledge is not genuinely common, rather it is a set of domain knowledge they and we have learned over a long period without consciously noticing.

What you said is true but often when you pay for a lawyer you're paying in part for their longstanding business relationship and non-business reputation with everyone else they have to do business with.

Whether they know it or not the other party's lawyer, the DA, the Judge, the clerk at the courthouse, etc are more likely to (unconsciously) give favorable treatment to a lawyer with a name they recognize who's been working in that jurisdiction for 30yr, been bankrolling the local little league team for 20 and funding local politicians campaigns for 10 than he is with someone's who's just become a partner at a law firm that's only existed for a decade and isn't held in high regard by every other important person in the jurisdiction. People generally give people they know better treatment than people they don't. This effect is important for anyone who's job involves negotiation with other people in an industry without tons of turnover.

But this isn’t about ‘idealist techies’ or ‘people with big bucks’. It is not their domain of expertise. Only their influence. The ones whose input must be taken are farmers.

Like me. This is my domain of expertise but I have no influence. I am a farmer. Why isn’t my opinion valid when I ask for automation to save my sector? But everyone’s opinion is considered from engineers to VCs to politicians to the public. But I am the one who is going into debt and scrambling for labour and making agonizing decisions about what to do without..but when I ask for automation, it falls on deaf ears. It’s very depressing. And frustrating. And beggars belief.

I don't think olive industry will move out in the south of euorpe, it is highly vinculated to people and villages. There are huge extensions of land dedicated to that, and that land can't be used to grow many things. As far as I remember I've only seen almond trees, sheeps, vinewoods and grain, and the last two only in plain lands. I don't know if those extensions can be used to grow more profitable stuff, but I don't think people would want to. Also olive trees require to work on them only a few times per year. The desrtuction of those olive orchards would be a death sentence for many small villages. The only thing I feel could replace some of those fields are solar panels; in those regions it's not strange to be 6 months with a single drop of rain.

They will make more $ as tourist destinations and cottage ag industry. Modern olive groves are planted for mechanization of harvests. Olive trees can go on for a hundred years even and a tree that old is no longer profitable. esp for the demand we have and for cost of labour involved. Automation will at least secure local production profitably.

> it's cheaper to raze down old olive orchards and just plant new ones

Sure there are a lot of mass production olive oil across southern europe consisting of 'young' olive trees.

However, I don't think you realize how much history there is associated with some olive orchards and how old some of these trees are (multiple centuries old). To have a disease wipe these trees or voluntarily chop them down would be a huge heritage loss.

Personally, even if it's more expensive, I only buy olive oil from Europe, at least to support where I live

So you want to reduce trade between Europe and neighbouring mediterranean nations like Morocco and Turkey, the same countries we want to take in all the refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

There's no need to politicize the issue or bring the completely irrelevant refugee topic in the discussion. Anyway the argument is so oversimplified that it's irrelevant in any discussion. No matter where you buy from a similar argument can just as easily and arbitrarily be used pro or against it.

I strongly disagree. Trade is very relevant to improving living standards and living standards are very relevant to migration (which is the term I should have used instead of refugees in spite of the fact that these two issues are closely linked).

Of course this is a complex subject, but I am responding to the extremely oversimplified idea that not buying from neighbouring regions is somehow supporting "where we live".

This I completely agreed with until 3 weeks ago. When borders close you need local industries and a degree of security in terms of food and other resources. The foreign owned supermarket couldn’t provide and the locally owned one couldn’t either (there are only 2 here in New Zealand), and it took over an hour queuing to find this out. However I contacted a farm with a mill which could. I don’t know what to think now, as it isn’t practical to make everything in one country.

I don't doubt that it's a good idea to have some local food production everywhere. But huge olive plantations in Spain, Italy or Greece are not that. They wouldn't exist in this form without trade.

Also, self sufficiency doesn't really work, not for very long at least. After a few weeks, you run out of some chemical or some replacement part.

The right response to a pandemic can't be to return to a medieval style economy.

> huge olive plantations in Spain, Italy or Greece are not that. They wouldn't exist in this form without trade.

So you would move the "huge olive plantations" from Spain, Italy and Greece to Turkey and Tunisia, which also couldn't exist without trade?

No, I wouldn't "move" anything. I just wouldn't boycott them based on the premise that trade only benefits one side.

I don't disagree that trade has benefits on both sides, but why would I need to import oil from the other side when it can be produced locally?

For one, it's not produced locally. I live in London. There are no olive trees here.

I'm buying a lot of Spanish, Italian and Greek olive oil because I like it and I trust their standards. But I see no reason why I should reject Moroccan or Turkish olive oil as a matter of principle.

I think that barring any special circumstances, it's best for the progress of humanity if consumers buy the best value for money. It creates upward pressure on productivity, which is ultimately the _only_ thing that increases potential living standards for everyone.

I know this is very complex, and there are many ways in which prices can be distorted so that "value for money" isn't what it appears to be on the surface.

However, there are equally many ways in which alleged "distortions" are exploited as an excuse for damaging protectionism. For instance, the "cheap labour" argument is often used in an extremely biased way.

One person's "cheap labour" is another person's improvement in living standards and yet another person's access to healthy food that was previously only available to the wealthy.

Perhaps a more succinct answer to your question is this: To force local producers to move up the value chain or become more productive.

> But I see no reason why I should reject Moroccan or Turkish olive oil as a matter of principle

But this is the point you're missing: it's not just a matter of principle. It's a matter of reasoning. For a EU citizen buying from Italy, Greece, or Spain makes more sense (money permitting) than buying from Morocco because it's far more likely that a weaker EU country economy will negatively affect their country or the whole EU than a weak Moroccan economy.

What happens to the UK economy if all or many UK citizens start buying stuff made abroad out of some moral obligation? Because if it is negatively impacted in any way then it pretty much proves it was not just a matter of principle.

And to counter some more of your points, local olive producers are already the highest on the value chain and at this point any productivity boosts will come at a cost many are not willing to accept and that conflicts with the previous point. Think chemicals, think lower quality, etc. Why are free-range chickens (and eggs) so popular in the UK if you could just increase productivity with high stocking density?

With every comment you throw the goalpost in another zipcode.

>For a EU citizen buying from Italy, Greece, or Spain makes more sense than buying from Morocco because it's far more likely that a weaker local EU economy will negatively affect their country or the EU than a weak Moroccan economy.

No. You are implying that buying locally strengthens the domestic economy whereas importing weakens the domestic economy. That reasoning is flawed as a general principle (even though it may well be true in specific cases or circumstances).

>What happens to the UK economy if all or many UK citizens start buying stuff made abroad out of some moral obligation?

Well, that would be extremely stupid and I'm not advocating it at all. There is no such moral obligation and I didn't say anything to that effect.

> No. You are implying that buying locally strengthens the domestic economy whereas importing weakens the domestic economy

The more customers local businesses lose in favor of off-shore producers the weaker they get, to the point where they disappear or become importers. If you're an EU citizen you're more likely to be impacted if another EU country's economy isn't going well than if Morocco's economy suffers. One thing is for sure, economies don't strengthen by giving up local production and export in favor of importing or all-local consumption.

> Well, that would be extremely stupid. There is no such moral obligation and I didn't say anything to that effect.

Now why would that be stupid? After the passionate argumentation that trade is very relevant to improving living standards in those poorer countries and that it does not weaken the domestic economy you come back to say that doing it would be stupid? You just shot your argument in both feet and sawed them off for good measure. Or perhaps arbitrarily only some people should buy from off-shore while others from near-shore. As for the "moral argument" you said exactly something to that effect:

> the same countries we want to take in all the refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

The EU-Turkey refugee agreement is for over 6bn Euros in aid. That's in case you thought all that "refugee taking" is expected to be paid in olives or trade assistance.

>The more customers local businesses lose in favor of off-shore producers the weaker they get, to the point where they disappear or become importers.

Yes, that is a possibility and it happens all the time. But what are some possible outcomes for the economy as a whole?

a) Domestic producers improve productivity and standards so they can compete with lower wages elsewhere.

b) Domestic producers move up the value chain importing lower value goods and services.

c) The domestic economy declines while a foreign one rises.

Your economic model only allows for c while some combination of a and b has been the basis for our economic progress and prosperity. That's why I disagree with you.

Your morals/pity accusation is a misunderstanding predicated on your assumption that importing goods we could produce ourselves hurts our economy. As I do not agree with that assumption, it follows that morals or pity couldn't possibly have been my motivation for bringing up migration.

My motivation for bringing it up was that trading with these countries is an opportunity to act in our mutual interest. It can benefit both sides and it is an opportunity to do what keeps getting repeated every time we have a migration crisis: Improve living standards in our neighboring regions. We shouldn't waste this opportunity based on some flawed mercantilist economic model.

> buying locally strengthens the domestic economy whereas importing weakens the domestic economy. That reasoning is flawed as a general principle

I don't see how it's flawed as a general principle, even if it could be true in specific cases or circumstances (like your local economy moving up the value chain or becoming more productive and more competitive).

Economies moving up the value chain and becoming more productive is not a special circumstance. It's the most fundamental force of economic progress and prosperity.

That's why acting in a way that weakens this force should be a rare exception rather than the rule.

Depends on how you define self sufficiency. If Sweden considers olive oil a staple and thinks it can’t be self sufficient because they can’t supply locals with locally grown olive oil, then that’s a wrong definition of self sufficiency.

So what is a valid and useful definition of self sufficiency in your opinion?

I think any definition would lead to massively plummeting living standards in a country the size of Sweden. It's not just about stuff that doesn't exist in a particular country. It's mostly about lost economies of scale.

What were the Swedes eating before they could ship food from all over the world?

We have hydroponics, automation and the ability of western worlds to pay what food is worth.

Developing countries and poor countries should be able to use their resources for their advancement and not to provide cheap food to richer countries.

If Sweden cannot grow olive oil because it’s an exotic commodity from a foreign land, they must pay dearly for it.

The notion that we buy cheap from nations that have a surfeit of resources and are favourably placed for ag closer to the equator has its origins in colonialism.

Over consumption in richer countries stem from unequal trade terms and results in inequalities.

Just imagine..you can never ever grow or make olive oil in Sweden. How valuable it must be for them? Why isn’t Turkey making bank and stashing Euros like Alladins and inside treasure cave?

Africa’s natural resources and Chile’s minerals ...why are they picking up pennies while the whole world proposers trading while they don’t?

I see the same thing in Ag. Farmers have the most precious non renewable resource ..water and land. You cannot print land, you know? And yet, why are farmers always in debt and killing themselves because they can’t pay back the bank for their quarter million dollar tractors and credit lines?

Something smells fishy, no?

You suggested there is a moral duty of an individual in the EU to buy specifically from outside Europe (like Morocco or Turkey) because they were expected to receive migrants. What about the moral argument that by buying from any oppressive or dictatorial regime you are supporting that regime?

And wouldn't this directly hurt local businesses? Given that the cost of living and production in the EU is higher the only way those businesses can survive is if a wealthier population buys the product, which is a much narrower segment of the market.

> not buying from neighbouring regions is somehow supporting "where we live"

Yes, buying from "someone" does support "someone". You can't be surprised by this, can you? Businesses need customers to survive. Without customers all local producers especially in such "expensive" countries become local importers from cheaper countries. What happens to the local economy once so much of the production is moved abroad, especially in exceptional situations like today? What happens when relation with that country go sour?

You suggest that EU citizens should leave Greek and Italian family business out to dry because Morocco and Turkey are receiving immigrants.

This is a weak argument, appealing only to pity ("but think of the immigrants") and brushing aside everything else.

>You suggested there is a moral duty of an individual in the EU to buy specifically from outside Europe (like Morocco or Turkey) because they were expected to receive migrants.

No, that's not what I'm suggesting at all and it's not what I'm doing myself. I'm suggesting to buy the best value for money wherever it may come from (barring special circumstances).

I'm also suggesting that reducing trade with poorer neighbors has downsides for everybody, even if you are convinced that buying locally is economically beneficial.

>Yes, buying from "where they live" does support "where you live".

No, it does not necessarily do that. If you buy the same quality at a higher price locally, you may well be preventing your local economy from moving up the value chain or from becoming more productive and more competitive.

>You made a weak argument, appealing only to pity

That would be true if I was advocating buying worse value for money to support those countries. But that's not what I'm saying at all.

> I'm suggesting to buy the best value for money wherever it may come from

Many EU citizens see a lot of value in buying from inside the EU rather from any far-off country. When Greece's economy went bad all of the EU suffered a bit. Not so much if the economy of Chile goes bad. The more customers your "local" (national or EU) business loses to foreign producers that may have far lower production costs and quality, the more likely it is it will downsize or drop quality.

> No, it does not necessarily do that.

You followed this up with a very particular corner case which is not applicable here. The reasons EU olives are more expensive are because cost of living/production are higher, and standards are observed more closely. And the reason someone may prefer them are that standards are observer more closely and the choice to support local businesses. None of the are really something to argue with arguments of trade helping some other country that receives immigrants.

> But that's not what I'm saying at all.

Perhaps if next time you make your point clearer from the first attempt and not issue just a blanket, generic statement supported by an appeal to pity there would be no need to come back repeatedly to bring clarifications that in no way are obvious from your original comment. Especially when that comment was supposed to counter someone's personal opinion about what they prefer doing. Maybe you had the right idea but left too much of it out to the point where it becomes a frustrating puzzle of a discussion where you keep getting new pieces, some are the wrong size, some from another box, and some are actually onions.