Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.

A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.

Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You could double their pay, include it in the price, and I wouldn't care.

There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.

Your example with milk is a very good illustration - something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is much more important than what it might seem based on the fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the retail buyer pays.

All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably could, but why would they gift money to other businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter revenue), you might as well go out of business since you won't be earning anything.

Mango farms are a pretty good example. Old farmers have grown their trees very tall and let the fruit grow as big as possible. It is very difficult for pickers to harvest the fruit. If you train the pickers to prune the trees and ensure a consistent size you can often plant more trees, have each tree bear more but smaller fruit with superior yield.

Because of the decreased height fruit pickers can harvest more fruit per shift and the risk of fruit falling to the ground and only being used in food processinng is minimized. Overall it's a net gain for poor farmers and fruit pickers in Africa and consumers benefit from a greater availability mangos.

These techniques are very common in developed countries though.

At that point it’s not a question of making money, but minimizing losses.

There is no money in agriculture. The only reason why most farms aren't bankrupt is because of subsidies.

Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom bust cycle.

https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/us-heads-for-highe....

15% is absolutely "I will go bankrupt if I don't have this" territory.

Net result fewer workers, a shift in which farms are profitable, and a ripple effect up the supply chain, but most bankruptcy would be from farms that do so sooner. Aka they would have been bankrupt in a 10 years and now it happens in 5.

*Effective price being the sales price plus total subsidies.

This of course is too complex to model is completely ignored. A lot like ignoring the atmosphere when designing air planes.

Good on them.

I guess it was only a matter of time before economists stopped misunderstanding physics and started misunderstanding computer science. I mean there's not much prestige left in physics since the end of the cold war. Are we going to see a Turing prize in economics like the Nobel prize?

But, clearly you’re simply using terms without understanding what they mean.

Food distribution is a complete disaster. Lots of middlemen between farmers and consumers inflate prices

All sorts of narrow specialized skill jobs (e.g. rebuilding electric motors) have gone this way in the west.

and at least that option might help fertilize their fields for next season.

The worst paid are always the most powerless.

Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can give you more control over your own salary.

Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of Wrath and is still happening today.

Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.

Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply

It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table. Namely that you understand that price exists to be a deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that you don't need something anymore.

The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.

That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay a fair price that accounts for increased wages.

The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop buying them, there is no need to produce even more of what is already not being purchased.