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

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

#211

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

dirtyid wrote: post #100

baybal2 wrote: post #68

Coworkers in Shenzhen are already saying that more fancier foods are already getting scarcer in the inland China, and prices are going up by day. China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-c…

Likely coming to the US too, big suppliers are ringing very small producers to fill in orders because US can't get any Mexican farmhands in. Canada is exempting and flying in migrant labours. There's also panic in meat supply chains with Tyson strikes. I'd like to think Canada is safe but prices would probably get nutty if there's excess US demand unless we ban exports. Also migrant labours live like sardines, 20+ sh…

>massive waste and spoilage in the supply chain.

Maybe in the west, but not the case in China, food is relatively expensive, so very little is wasted, even poisonous rice can find snack factory buyers. Restaurant waste is colleted by small pig farms.

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

#212

Post by qayxc » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

downshun wrote: post #76

What is limiting robot-assisted telemetric food harvesting? Why cant I connect to the web with a gaming console, play farmer and be rewarded for it? The data could eventually be used to develop self-harvesting farms. There's already automated computer assisted surgery, so is this really that far off? Is it desirable? It runs eventually into a similar problem as self-driving cars and the looming unemployment of trucke…

> There's already automated computer assisted surgery, so is this really that far off? Is it desirable?

It's a question of cost and development effort versus utility. You can train a good picker/harvester within just a few weeks and that person can work the fields seasonally for decades while doing other productive things for the rest of the year.

Designing, building, deploying, and maintaining a machine complex enough to harvest asparagus, strawberries, and salad, however, is a very costly endeavour that yields very little benefit. The machines would cost billions to develop, millions to build, and are only usable for a short time of the year and for a very limited task.

A minimum-wage field worker can do the job faster and cheaper and a machine would basically need to run half a century just to pay for itself - and that doesn't even include the development costs.

Don't make the mistake to underestimate the amount of technology required to replace a human being for doing "simple tasks". Things that are simple for humans are incredibly hard for machines and vice versa.

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

#213

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #123

DoreenMichele wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world at large can make it work if people are willing to do these jobs for short periods of time in their youth before moving on to other things. The world is going to die of starvation if we literally can't find anyone who will do this work at all for any amount of time at any pay rate.

That basically seems to be New Zealand's (and Australia's?) mode of operation. Give the rich countries' young adults fresh out of school a work&travel visa for a year and extend it for a few months with sufficient farm work. They have fun doing new and interesting things and return to their countries with a good impression of yours. Of course that won't work if every place tries it though. I wonder how they're faring…

Thanks for that.

I live in a small town with high unemployment and an excess of homeless people. I have fantasies of putting together an "irregular jobs/work" program to help connect locals with remote work, gig work, seasonal work, etc.

My theory is that if you can find some way to connect people to "irregular jobs" who don't want (or can't reasonably do) "regular jobs," a lot of people would be willing to work who aren't working currently.

When I and my sons were homeless, we tried to figure out how to find something like day labor jobs and we were mystified. I asked around on the internet and got a smidgen of feedback, but we never figured it out.

I feel like something went wrong somewhere along the way and America no longer knows how to help people find work of that sort anymore. But maybe some of our social ills would improve if we found a solution to that piece of it.

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

#214

Post by Guthur » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #201

ciconia wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[flagged]

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

#215

Post by hyperbovine » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

Guthur wrote: post #214

dredmorbius wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[flagged]

That's a false dichotomy you're holding up.

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

#216

Post by g_langenderfer » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #141

phenkdo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you also look forward to the 10x grocery shit-bill you will be stuck with?

Numbers I've read is that farm labour accounts for ~10% of retail food cost for fruits. https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/ If that doubles because they have to pay local labour rates, the price would go up 10%. Possibly less if it just eats into the margins through the rest of the chain. We might also see a shift toward less laborious foods, which is fine by me.

Farming doesn't strike me as high margin. This increase in costs could send many farmers out of business. That will push up food prices.

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

#217

Post by pascalxus » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

sologoub wrote: post #40

pascalxus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad, but here in CA, most people don't have yards and there's nowhere to grow food. It's especially dumb because there's miles and miles of undeveloped land everywhere (at least in the east bay suberbs), not being used for anything in particular except maybe some farms with cows on it: I'm sure they're taking advantage of huge tax wholes because they're sitting on land that would cost 10s of millions of dollars…

SF Bay Area is not really representative of California as a whole. Most people outside of the dense cores have a place for a small garden. State is large and diverse. Los Angeles is a lot less dense and most people have at least a balcony on which you can grow stuff in pots. Won’t sustain you as the only source, but will provide greens and some variety. Yards are pretty common and usually green. Water shortages have…

You can drive out as far as fairfield, about 70 miles outside of the bay area and still see housing communities packed together like slums with nothing but yellow and green for miles in every direction.

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

#218

Post by atomi » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #125

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…

I love how this Fed has got people thinking employment is irrelevant. Sure, maybe if some people stopped working for a few months, it wouldn't matter to much. But we still need energy and water and food (and Internet). And most of this requires actual work being done. Not just updating numbers on a spreadsheet.

Yeah but infrastructure is already up. A lot of the work required for upkeep doesn't require as many people as is required to build it out in the first place.

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

#219

Post by csomar » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #46

partingshots wrote: post #4

Doesn’t the Netherlands export the majority of Europe’s fresh food? As long as the supply chain doesn’t break down, I don’t see how it would be possible for Spain and Germany to run out of food. Especially since they’re all in the EU, even if the Netherlands wanted to close off their borders, there’s no way they really could.

Based on the greenhouses I could identify on google maps spain's part seems much larger. Netherlands - https://www.google.com/maps/@52.021357,4.5405597,46292m/data... Spain - https://www.google.com/maps/@36.7995257,-2.4654344,60237m/da...

That's not how it works. There are numbers and the Netherlands exports as twice as Spain. Probably because they have a smaller population, so they consume much less internally. Also it rains a LOT in the Netherlands while Spain is mostly Mediterranean. There is a reason why North Africa didn't have a big population until very recently.

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

#220

Post by phatfish » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69

dragonwriter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In America, it used to be common for young men in high school and college to do construction work during the summer. Now, it's mostly immigrants. Because college or college-bound adults are, if they are motivated enough to work in the first place, mostly focussed on work that provides a competitive advantage in college admissions and post-college careers, which trade labor mostly isn't.

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.

Not sure how attacking "young people" as weak solves anything. It's simply what the job demands.

If you are working in construction chances are you are stronger than someone sitting at a desk. Put the person sitting at the desk in the construction job for a month and I bet they build some muscle.

Same as sitting the construction worker at a desk 8 hrs a day will make them physically weaker.

This is the reason for the boom in gym membership in the last ~15 years.