Supermarkets can sell 6 ripe tomatoes for £1 or a pineapple from another country for £1, if you tried to grow those at home (if you even had the correct climate) it would cost a lot more than that. for the location, soil, water, feed, making sure it’s got no pests, etc. How do supermarkets charge so little for stuff that requires so much to mass produce?
In: Economics
The same way all economy of scale works. Virtually everything is cheaper/more efficient to produce at a larger scale. This is, at its most basic, why you can buy a t-shirt for $15 instead of waving up 6 months’ wages for a seamstress to hand-sew it. Mechanization dramatically increases the land area you can plow/plant/fertilize, much more than the increase in cost. It’s cheaper to build one massive storage facility than 100 small ones. Transportation is cheaper in bulk. A few people can do the white collar paperwork for a massive farm, that would take up a significant portion of the labor of all 100 farmers on their own 100 plots.
And, of course, they’re grown in poorer countries than the US. When a few huge multinationals own all the farmland they can pay absolute dirt wages and still get work, because there’s no one else to work for. Tbf, this is true in the US, too., most agricultural labor here is done by temporary migrant laborers who aren’t US citizens, and have little power to stop a company from mistreating them. But the “normal” wages in a poorer country are lower, and the shit wages there are *way* lower. When you’re shipping literal tons of pineapples in ocean tankers, the transport costs per pound are so little that it can be cheaper to harvest them in Latin America, ship them to Asia for canning, and ship them back to the US to sell, rather than grow and can them all in the US.
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