From your linked article, the reason people spend a greater percentage of their incomes on food is not because of the cost of food, but that their incomes are much lower:

> The figures do not mean that food is more expensive in Nigeria than in the US. In fact, quite the reverse. The average American spends $2,392 per year on food, the average Nigerian half that: $1,132. The average Kenyan spends just $543 a year on food.

There are many benefits of Africa having the infrastructure/skills/industry to produce food in a more scalable way, but % of income is possibly not the metric to measure by.

[edit] changed last sentence.

Look at it this way: if the percentage income spent on food dropped from 60% to, say 20%, that would effectively double their remaining income! I don't see how that could not affect a local economy, regardless of the absolute scale.

I think the point is that actually doubling income is a better way to increase income than trying to optimize the price of one product.

What we do know is that food is already very cheap in Africa. It's not obvious that food could get much cheaper, let alone the 300% price reduction that you give in your example.

On the other hand, we do know there are huge gains to be had when it comes to increasing income and economic activity in general. That's where our effort would be best spent.

This is literally creating local jobs. A job equals more income than no job. So this is raising incomes. In addition, there's less capital leaving the country buying foreign produce. So the money that would be spent anyway creates a local job, and in return is again spent locally by a Ghanaian farmer, instead of spent in Europe by a Dutch farmer. This is literally a win all around. An economy is a system, you can't just one day create amazing jobs without an entire support system around them.

If they're importing a large amount of their food from Europe as the article states they very well can lower the cost by producing it locally. Even if they're less efficient than the Europeans in doing so.

I'm not sure they can, actually. The wheat fields of Kansas or the Ukraine are so vastly more productive than trying to grow crops in a tropical climate.

Plus a lot of those fields of grain are subsidized during times of plenty for national security (and other) reasons.

If food prices drop, won’t farmers make less too and hence lower income?

Maybe I am not understanding the math properly. Food is cheap in the USA because we import them from poorer countries where labour is cheap. And we also consume a lot. This benefits the exporting country. But if we were to produce our own food, the local production won’t be cheaper.

You can do that in two ways: Reduce cost of food by two thirds or double their income.

Both of these feats would be incredible. So yeah, if we could do incredible things, that would be amazing.

Let's get back to reality though: Food prices are more or less set by international markets. African farmers can't compete with other countries, because they work so inefficiently. Making more people work as farmers doesn't change that.

That's the reason why Africans import so much food. It's actually cheaper. You don't need more people working as farmers, you would need automation to be competitive, but then less people are actually employed. Even then, this wouldn't lower food prices below market price, because those farmers can now export instead of serving the domestic market.

How do you propose to double their income?

Where do you get this number, $2,392 per year? I can tell you that for me, it's way more than that.

The BLS reports an annual expenditure of $7,729/year per "consumer unit", and an average of 2.5 persons per consumer unit, so about $3,100/person/year in 2017. That number is probably a few years old.

I do wonder if this accounts for SNAP and other food expenses not directly paid with cash income.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/consumer-expenditures/2017/...

> I can tell you that for me, it's way more than that.

I would suspect the average HN reader tends more towards upper-middle class than the average nationally.

I was quoting from the article linked to by the grandparent. I presume that article provides references?

> A local agriculture will drive down the cost of food

Is this true? In my experience the cheapest food is rarely almost never locally produced. It may be marketing and the demand for local food is higher.

Long supply chains have a lot of value add. Sure there is cost to transporting and storing the food, but the process has other efficiencies that more than make up for the cost. I've even read stories about Central American countries exporting their produce only to reimport it back for the locals to conusme.

It really depends. In high cost of labor countries, the long supply chain likely is cheaper due to many small compounding reasons.

In low cost of labor countries, I've seen the exact opposite. It's probably not very profitable in the US to setup a vegetable stand for 12 hours a day along a highway for $10/hr of sales. In many countries it is - you have a market garden and put one of the grandparents/children/cousins/etc. manning the retail operation. A single western tourist can make your entire day profitable (including opportunity costs) assuming no other sales.

In my experience you pay a huge premium in the US for locally grown (e.g. weekend farmers markets) - but in other countries it's the opposite - supermarkets are pretty expensive, and the "local farmer" markets are a quarter of the price.

It gets even more crazy, though. Very frequently there are weird market conditions that create massive losses for large suppliers. Random google link: https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9056981/india-tomato-whol... You can see that the price dropped as much as 74% These things happen around the world surprisingly frequently.

Large supermarkets, etc, can get access to these ridiculous prices and so it can cause prices to stay fairly low. However, it is not really healthy for the farmers. If you live in a really rural area that doesn't have access to a large world-wide market, the local food will be a lot cheaper because the only outside food you have access to is super expensive.

For me, buying local is about agricultural sustainability. It's about making sure that my neighbours can grow food, sell it and live comfortably. I'd also rather have many small farmers producing the best quality produce they can, than 1 super farmer that is trying to produce the cheapest produce they can. This all adds up to higher prices, of course.

I often feel that we should have "fair trade" in food everywhere. I can buy a pound of raisons from California for less than $2. The same grapes would be 4 pounds. $2000 of raisons at a retail price is 4000 pounds of grapes... And you think for those tonnes of grapes... how much is the farmer getting? It gets a bit crazy.

Maybe it's cheaper to transport raisins than grapes? They are smaller so you could fit more of them on a truck. Also they are already dried out, so they may be less sensitive to shipping conditions.

It certainly is, but imagine a pile of 1000 pounds of grapes. Imagine an iphone. They have the same retail cost. Is this reasonable?

In Kazakhstan local food is not cheap as well. Yes, human labor is cheap. But that means that it's cheap for supply chain as well. I live in Astana and a lot of fruits are imported from Uzbekistan, even those that could be grown locally like apples. There are people who grow apples, potatoes and other vegetables in their gardens, mainly for themselves but they also sell what they don't need. And that price is not low. On the other side, imported vegetables usually don't have good taste, probably because they are optimized for export, so that high price vegetables have their buyers.

As someone who lives in Africa, I can assure you that the cheapest food around is locally grown. My guess for why is that import duties make a sizable chunk portion of the cost and that the infrastructure for keeping things cold/fresh is expensive or non-existent, driving up the risks and costs of importing fresh items.

In a country with a less developed transportation network local food will be cheaper than transported food. Keep in mind that lowering food prices for a developed country is a much different optimization game than lowering food costs for an undeveloped country. Not every country has a freight rail network as effective as the US.

Thanks for those stats and the link. One issue I have with that though is it doesn't seem to take into account farm subsidies and trade barriers restricting food imports. One makes the true cost of food much higher than it appears to be, while the other makes that cost much higher than it needs to be. Then there's general government spending on rural areas and the rural economy on top of that, which make it very difficult to make neat parallels between their economic situations.