Why is fruit/vegetables so cheap despite the time and resources needed to produce them?
In: Economics
I feel like a lot of the responses in this thread miss something or are just in a very different situation than my country.
In Italy farmers invest to cultivate lets say tomatoes, they invest 50k hoping they’ll earn positive from the investiment, thing is that supermarket chains or big corps have a clever strategy, they know when tomatoes(in this example) are going to rot, so they present themselves to the farmers when they fear they could lose both earnings and harvest, so they’re forced to sell at whatever price, this leads to sell off even at 5 cents per kilo even the famous pachino tomatoes, because “that or nothing”.
This also leads to farmers ghost hiring(not legal) immigrants at low cost to contain costs, this is called caporalato.
This way supermarket can sell cheap and the times when vegetables and fruit are not cheap is because of transport costs(not that alone), for example in sicily tomatoes cost much less than let’s say in Milan, because usually tomatoes are produced and exported from south of italy to north, tomatoes in sicily cost 1 euro per kilo, in milan 5 euro per kilo.
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