US Agriculture Will Be Outsourced to Latin America. Wait and See.
Tourists love tropical paradises in Central America, from Mexico to Panama. It’s also the perfect place to grow food.
American consumers have actually already decided to get future food from Latin America. It’ll happen the same way that people chose to close factories and lose jobs in exchange for cheapness and abundance from China.
Farming and ranching will similarly follow the path of manufacturing that we outsourced to China, getting rid of pollution in the process. The dangerous and demeaning trek northward is totally unnecessary. Let the workers stay home and build their own economic prosperity.
Eating for even the poorest Americans will get better and better, cheaper food and more of it, without the need for various “feeding” programs. Instead of bringing Latin America to the north, agricultural workers will stay with their own people, with identities intact.
Latin Americans were encouraged to travel north from Mexico and Central America to labor within existing agricultural operations, but isn’t that like bringing Chinese to fill low wage jobs in factories here? It’s much better to let all people stay in their home countries, then ship products to the US. Staying at home means that centuries-old heritage remains intact, without all the personal angst and social disruption that comes from abandoning roots and living as an alien.
Moving fruit production out of Florida and California’s Central Valley, for example, back to Mexico and Central America will be a humanitarian gesture in places where lower wages aren’t noticed as much, so long as people have jobs and are happy in situ. The ancestral sense of belonging counts for a lot more. Same as in China.
Fresh fruit and vegetables are very chic in American diets, but the population-at-large wants produce at a minimal cost. This practice has already been “voted in” at cash registers. Jobs won’t be lost in California and Florida by shipping production southward. Mega-farmers are really like the plantation owners of yesteryear, aren’t they? They can just as easily set up shop in Mexico and other points farther south.
Migrant workers can return home, where the jobs are. The US workforce and food distribution won’t be affected since Americans have refused such jobs, just as they have the cramped, low-paying factory work in China.
A Monroe Doctrine for food production can be managed from the US, making sure that quality standards are the absolute best. We have the resources. Dole’s organic banana is as good a model as any. Economic opportunity is the key to personal and social happiness, as I wrote almost two years ago on this site.
For moral reasons, the US should challenge any business which depends on foreign laborers being uprooted from their home countries. Shame on Europeans today. It’s one thing to labor hard as a native tradition (all societies have done so) but quite demeaning to do so as a mercenary elsewhere.
The western hemisphere, the Americas, is where our food should come from, logically and logistically speaking. Bulk perishables shouldn’t travel around the globe, unlike dry goods from China which can endure long sea travel in containers.
The British Empire worked this way in its heyday, bringing jobs and much-needed infrastructure to colonies abroad. Benefits were equal on both sides of the colonial equation.
Stagnant societies were brought up to speed with modernism. Unemployed British people were sent to places like India as administrators and quality-control experts. Railroads were built, universities started, and hospitals made state of the art. The same can happen in Central America.
Sorry, Brad, but I reject the foundation of your argument. Perhaps SOME fruits or a few vegetables may be grown outside the US, however, our basic agri-economy is just fine and I see no reason for that to change. And yes, foreigners come here to work our fields, but it’s because of the money and the fact that they live in third world crap holes. What makes you believe that if we export all of our agriculture to THEIR countries, they will somehow become prosperous? They have the ability to do that now, except for the fact that most of them are poorly educated and living under the thumbs of petty leaders who only seek to enrich themselves and not their citizens.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Thomas. I was surprised that you sidestepped my analogy to the outsourcing of manufacturing to China, however. If our factories were “just fine” before, then why did it happen? At one time in our history, we did bring the Chinese here to do menial labor, just as we did Africans.
Getting rid of pollution helped us out, but aren’t we suffering from a social pollution by bringing so many people here from “third world crap holes”? Do you draw the line somewhere when it comes to importing unfortunate people from such holes around the world to our country?
When you say that “most of them are poorly educated and living under the thumbs of petty leaders who only seek to enrich themselves and not their citizens,” I’m glad that you didn’t make the same claim about our own society.