Re:The Age of Robot Farmers
by l_camacho84 on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @09:29AM
(#19624409)
The costs are tiny because right now they not internalize pollution and social injustice. Yes, “local” is not an end on itself but the same is true for “global”. Right now the cost of sending a banana to the other side of the world in a container is small because we are jeopardizing the future of the planet by not putting a price on CO2 emissions.
Local food need to spend effort on Marketing because they are more expensive that monocultures, and the reason for this is that monoculture prices benefit from subsidies and not paying externalities. We need to fix this for the sake of future generations and if we do this local goods would be much more competitive and so much more effective in marketing.
Well that's exactly what I preempted and refuted in my second paragraph, and my third paragraph was about how, no, just making mass produced food internalize all their costs won't fix all the marketing and sales issues of 'locally produced food', for a broad definition of everything that encompasses...
The next thing then is, of course, that current costs externalize many hidden costs. Which is true, but look at efficiency gains of current gen freight ships, with sails made of solar panels and that sort of thing, and look at the economics of freight shipping - even at double the (shipping) cost, it would still be only a fraction of the retail cost.
Oh and marketing/sales costs for locally grown goods being low is straight up not true. Look at how hard it is for those small scale farmers to sell their wares, schlepping their old vans from farmers market to CSA collection point, and how much of their product goes to waste because of distribution inefficiencies...