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.
As someone who lives in one of the most expensive cities in the world (NYC) and yet routinely buys perfect apples, strawberries and blueberries for $1 a pound or less in my neighborhood market (and if I wanted bananas for 39 cents a pound and seedless grapes for .99 a pound and…) I too have wondered about the economics of this.
Noting that the berries are not always this cheap, but when they are in season, we will buy 10-20 pounds at a time and freeze them. Blueberries have been (3) 6oz containers for a dollar for the past 2 weeks. Strawberries tend to peak at 50 cents a pound in the early summer.
Here’s a fun YouTube (https://youtu.be/URvWSsAgtJE) showing economies of scale. This guy spends 6 months and $1500 to make just one sandwich completely from scratch
Fruit/vegetables are cheap?
Migrant immigrant labor is a big part of it. You get paid something like $2 a flat picking blueberries, strawberries is maybe double but its backbreaking. Piece work basically,with no insurance or benefits. Bananas are cheap because the banana republics still exist ruled by American led dictatorships. Chocolate is still cheap because its produced in the 3rd world with the backing of Nestle, aka the most evil corporation on the planet. A lot of chicken is cheap because they ship it to china for processing.
This post has been locked as there are several good answers and most of the new top-level comments are anecdotal or off-topic.
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