Meaningless Advocacy

Civil Eats: A Meal Without a Mexican? Your Food Has Already Migrated!

In short, most Americans—not just those residing in the Southwest border states—have become increasingly dependent on food produced, harvested, processed and serve by Mexican-Americans in the U.S. or Mexican citizens who have recently returned to their homelands. Regardless of the tremendous growth in and success of “food relocalization” efforts across the country, most of our schoolchildren and elders could not eat a nutritionally-balanced diet without the fresh produce and seafood pouring across our borders from Mexico.

But this flow of food will not last if Mexican lands and waters are degraded or overexploited, and if the farmers, farmworkers, fishers and truckers who grow, weed, process, and deliver us much of our food are not offered liveable wages and healthier working conditions. It is time to reset the balance so that those who bring us our daily bread are adequately rewarded financially and ethically for their intelligence, hard work and sacrifices, rather than being treated as second class citizens at best and unwanted presences at worst.

If a living-wage is to be paid (and how can this be achieved without increasing the price of food, if we are to keep food production local and limited), then why wouldn't average Americans be willing to do farm labor? Thus a liberal is caught trapped in his platitudes. The reason why cheap labor is used by industrial agriculture is because they can get away with it, while local/organic farms have to do so because the businesses would not be able to survive otherwise.

A better economist can speak on this, but we will not have parity of costs and wages until we start pricing energy (in particular, fossil fuels) according to its true value.

Misc.
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