From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages • Hacker News Board

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#201

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

ciconia wrote: post #188

aazaa wrote: post #60

> From Huelva to Hamburg and Newcastle to Naples, Europe’s farmers are struggling to find people to bring in rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables, which frequently must be hand-picked, usually within a window of just a few days. They typically rely on seasonal workers from eastern Europe or northern Africa, but fears of the coronavirus are keeping hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from leaving home, and con…

It's funny how everybody (in the first world) just takes for granted the fact that a large part of the agricultural workforce is low-paid migrant workers. All of us want our food to be available all year round, and cheap. It's been my opinion for a while that food prices do not represent the real cost of food production when taking into account all the externalities. Low-wage labor is just one of those externalities.

Modern market economics is a ... marvel ... of numerous uncosted externalities.

Pollution, labour, externalised risk, unaccounted systemic risks, natural resource depletion and formation costs, political power, corruption...

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#202

Post by GordonS » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #113

GordonS wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source that the 9sqm claim? It seems... completely unbelievable. My wife's parents grow various vegetables in an area of that size, and there is no way it could provide all their vegetable needs.

If you grew potatoes you’d get 15000-45000 calories out of 9 sq meters. Not enough. 9mX9m (81sqm) and at the high end of yield you could get above starvation.

At least in the UK, I thought you could only harvest potatoes once a year? There is a 2-week school holiday in October, which in some parts of Scotland are still referred to as the "tattie holidays", because that's when the potatoes are harvested (I did it as a kid, it was back-breaking work...).

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#203

Post by m0zg » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #10

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Tangentially related, NPR aired an interview the other day with undocumented migrant workers (in the US) living very close together when traveling (sleeping sitting up together in a van) and having very limited access to water for bathing and hygiene when lodging at farms where they were working picking produce; it's likely this causes grave loss of life in the migrant community, and decimates produce farms economica…

Undocumented migrants have for all effect become the modern day equivalent of slavery without the associated compasion. Many happy to lambast such people and yet, be first to complain if their avocados go up in price or out of stock. Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven here as currently without that, will only shoot themselves in the foot on many levels. After all, many live day by day, kinda h…

> Hopefully, some level of amnisty and clean slate is driven

In the absence of the actual border and viable border enforcement a proper border would enable, that will only make the problem 10x worse, as a significant chunk of Mexico will try to go North in hopes of another "amnesty" in the future.

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#204

Post by Scoundreller » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

luxuryballs wrote: post #155

Scoundreller wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, with everyone being at home, and a lot of bullshit tasks being eliminated/deferred (my driver's license is automatically good for an extra 6 months), caloric demand is probably down 10%. As our muscles atrophy, basal metabolic rates will decrease too. Undetermined what kind of hit to population COVID will cause, but I'm estimating <1%.

demand is up in my house, proximity to food storage seems to trump caloric needs

Time to hide food around the house and make dinner a hunt.

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#205

Post by baq » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

Sawamara wrote: post #80

dasil003 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird comment, you might as well say no one forced humans to be such social creatures allowing viruses spread easily. People make relatively optimal local decisions based on the situation at hand. It's ludicrous to suggest they should have foreseen this situation and just paid more for labor. That kind of second-guessing could be applied to basically 90% of the world right now, and the other 10% just g…

Its not a weird comment. The current global mode of production is engineered to ONLY work when there are no global crisises at hand. Guess what: we have a global crisis at hand now. Which means that the neoliberal modus operandi fails without a struggle. It just collapsed overnight. And if you think otherwise, just answer me this: if tourism cedes to exist, what do wild west neoliberal goverments do (with their curre…

Easy - farmers can’t pay more because they would be outcompeted by those who pay less. Race to the bottom which ends predictably bad but which players in the market can’t do anything about short of illegal price fixing or temporary workers unionizing (like that could happen).

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#206

Post by Mirioron » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

banmeagaindan2 wrote: post #96

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And because young people are less physically fit than they used to be, so they don't have the muscle and stamina required by such jobs. But the reasons why are almost irrelevant. The pertinent detail is that employers can't fill these jobs without immigrant labor. Most Americans don't want them at any pay rate.

It does not need to be most Americans and a lot of office workers would prefer to be farmers if the wage were correct. We have markets - let the prices rise and we will see more farmers in the future. E; I know it is not your theory Doreen - but it is a popular species of liberal (meaning democrat + republican) political propaganda. Everything Moravec's Paradox ever said, everything Peter Thiel ever said about automa…

I don't think most would prefer to be farmers. Farm labor is one of the most dangerous occupations in the US: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i...

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#207

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #151

DoreenMichele wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I have ever read indicates that white Americans don't want farm labor jobs even if you pay $20/hour.

What people want to do work that damaged their body, is subject to short term changes in demand due to weather and has high income instability, and leads to no future growth? $20/hour for temporary backbreaking work in exchange for not being near friends or family, having to move constantly, having to live in a rural area (not what most people want), having no upward income mobility. The people that do it, do it beca…

The army has relatively low wages (but good benefits, which have been quietly eroding for decades), separates you from family on a routine basis and puts you in harm's way where people may be literally trying to kill you. They advertise it as "an adventure."

Some people join the army because they actively desire to get away from their family. Not everyone has some loving, cherished family situation.

Young people seem happy to be separated from their family for a few months to backpack across Europe or go play digital nomad.

During WW2, we promoted Victory Gardens and lots of people got on board.

I have tried to suggest that we should be checking our county extension office for info and trying to foster Victory Gardens in the face of the pandemic. We shouldn't wait until people are actually going hungry. But I'm a big fat nobody and I don't have much pull, so it's not exactly catching on like wildfire.

Most people work because they must. Even rich people have to do at least some work to effectively manage their wealth or it will run out. They just typically have more pleasant working conditions, but it's sort of a myth that rich people don't have to work.

They are less compelled to work at any particular thing right this minute so they can still eat next week, but when rich people do nothing at all but spend money, it eventually runs out.

(This may not be true for billionaires, but a million isn't worth what it used to be. This is generally true for most people, even people with a fair amount of wealth.)

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#208

Post by Scoundreller » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #180

Scoundreller wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a chance. When you're paying a couple bucks a pound for fresh ______, it didn't take 15 minutes of a migrant worker's time to plant/pick/care/pack that pound. My guess is that the migrant worker proportion of retail cost is edit: > What would happen to consumer food costs if farm wages rose and the extra costs were passed on to consumers? The average earnings of field workers were $9.78 an hour in 2008, according…

A long time ago, I read that you could double the wages of farm laborers and it would add like two cents or four cents to the cost of a box of breakfast cereal.

If that.

Many farm-products have negligible farm-labour cost in their production: beans, rice, tomatoes, pulses, potatoes, onions, grains...

Their farm costs are in land, storage, drying and expensive equipment. They're not being picked by hand and manually weeded.

And even then, the price difference between the farm-gate and grocery store is massive.

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#209

Post by patall » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

Since restaurants are one of the major sources of food going to trash, I was wondering whether the current crisis would not actually have an opposite effect with more food being on the market. Sure, not all types of food but on the other hand people have been buying a lot of nonperishable goods from what i have seen last few weeks which would also indicate lower demand in the near future.

Re: From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages

#210

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

jazzyk wrote: post #140

DoreenMichele wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I have ever read indicates that white Americans don't want farm labor jobs even if you pay $20/hour.

That's because they would never be able to afford basic things like: - college education ($30K-$75K/year, preceded by purchasing a shack for $800K in a good-school town) - health care ($25K/year for a high-deductible family plan) What's the point? Or do we consider education or healthcare luxury now?

America has long treated both education and healthcare as luxury items that only the rich deserve.

We need to fix those things. They are negatively impacting quite a lot of people. The lack of healthcare is hardly peculiar to farm labor jobs.