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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

regardless of how the contract is structured, no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away. this is similar to a law in the EU that forbids producers or distributors of clothing to destroy products they don't want to sell.

once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be allowed to be terminated before that end unless the grower is free to sell on the open market after termination.

anything else would allow patent owners to hold growers hostage ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶

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>Mora later sought to terminate his relationship with Giumarra, and he sold his nectarines to another fruit packer in 2023

The farmer sought termination and violated the contract.

ah, good catch. the question now is whether giumarra accepted the termination or not. i could not find that detail in the article. if they accepted it, then my argument holds (note that i am arguing how things should be, not what the actual current law on the matter is). if giumarra did not accept termination then the exclusive contract should still hold. (whether an exclusive contract is fair or not is another topic)

Would you bar a contract for the productivity of a tree for a given period of time, with a clause dictating how excess produce is to be disposed of?

yes, there should be no excess that needs to be disposed. if you produce excess you should reduce production.

A state of "excess production" can only be determined long after production parameters have already been committed to. Yields, logistics costs, and market capacity aren't knowable ahead of time.

sure, but the market consequence to overproduction is that the price goes down. if you are not allowed to destroy products just to keep the price up then you will self correct in time.

So should they ask the trees to fruit less, or cut them down knowing they can't get them back online for 10 years?

they should sell the fruits. and if can't sell all the fruit then yes, eventually they will need to reduce production.

Notably, US healthcare is run with this mindset. Perfect planning for exactly the capacity that we need.

Works "great".

sorry, i wasn't clear. i am specifically talking about excess that needs to be destroyed in order to keep prices up. meaning, artificially reducing the supply by creating waste.

The optimal quantity of discarded food is not zero.

true. but there is a difference between discarding food that has gone bad because you could not sell it, and discarding it without even trying to sell it because some exclusive contract prevents you from selling, or because you want to keep the price artificially high.

The optimal quantity of food discarded on a farm should be close to 0 I think. Obviously things rot, but that's not the situation here. For staples it can make sense to systematically overproduce so that we dont starve when things go badly, but ideally you find some other use for the excess like we do with ethanol. But I dont think that thought process plays much of a role with nectarines.

> no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away

It doesn't, to my knowledge. It requires they not sell them.

that's the same thing.

if you can't throw it away you need to be allowed to sell it.

the point here is sustainable production. the EU is implementing laws around that. if you produce more than what you can sell, then you need to reduce production and stop wasting resources.

> that's the same thing

It's really not. Exhibit A: this farmer giving away his nectarines. Hell, maybe he can write off the loss as a donation.

seems like that would be double dipping and likely prohibited. They already get to write off the entire cost of prouction and carry losses forward 7 years IIRC.

It’s not the same thing. He is allowed to give them away and is doing so. If Mora is in breach of contract, maybe a better remedy for the distributor would be monetary damages but that is not obvious.

There’s an interesting question of if the distributor misrepresented the deal to Mora as he claims, but from the summary it appears nothing related to that is recorded that the court finds legally relevant.

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