Sounds great until you realize how razor-thin the margins on farming are; and that all it takes is one bad year.
This is what governments are for. If the system doesn't pay people a livable wage to do the work to support our existence (food), then clearly we need to change the system to not be based on "maximizing profits".
But instead you justify it by saying the margins are "razor-thin", and farmers have to take advantage of people if they want to survive. And that justifies this terrible behavior. Move who you're blaming and call them to action, instead of just accepting terrible conditions for workers.
Farmers are responding to incentives, gov'ts have built subsidies for farmwork in the past, because food has to be cheap for people to live.
I know enough about their lives to know that your armchair quarterbacking is an absurdity.
Welcome to America. Where SV folk would scream slavery if they lived as a quarter of the nation does.
I hate the sentiment that because things are bad somewhere they should be bad elsewhere. Every time I bring up benefits that I have that others don't they start by saying "you shouldn't have those" instead of saying "I should have those too." It's like we're playing a weird game of the prisoner's dilemma, but there's not actually any benefit for the person defecting.
Maybe some blended rate, where you look at "buying housing for a family of 4 + rented apartment for a bachelor" and blend, to get living costs.
When I did research compared to where I live, I discovered a person makes more living near Ottawa, ON, making $70k USD/year, than someone making $250k/yr US in .. say, Palo Alto. This was of course primarily due to housing costs, although this was in 2020. Things have changed dramatically in most of Canada (re: housing) in the last 3+ years.
Of course yes, most certainly, if you buy + pay off a $3M USD house/land vs a $300k USD house, you have more money to retire on. You could theoretically move to a lower cost area, and retire with style. Yet who wants to (potentially) leave their kids who might settle in the region too, and additionally, all their friends, associates, etc, etc.
Any yet buying doesn't take into account "What if a person just rents for their entire life", which can happen. Nor does it take into account things such as property tax, and other associated housing costs (water tax, etc).
To give an idea of the massive cost differences, just the property tax on a typical $3M Palo Alto home is 4x my mortgage on my $250k house. My mortgage is $800 USD per month. Palo Alto monthly property tax on $3M home? A little over $3000/month. Paying 4x as much just in property tax, compared to my mortgage? Well, that money is gone, gone, gone in terms of 'life savings', and is pure additional cost.
For the record, my property tax is about $120USD/month. Let's call it 25x more for Palo Alto property tax.
Again, there have been dramatic changes in Canadian housing pricing in the last 3 years. There are also differences in how peoples are taxed. For example, I probably pay more federal and provincial income tax, and a little less property tax, with money tricking down from those levels to the municipal level. Yet, I also get free health care (quality debates and issues not relevant, just a point), $10/day state funded day care, and pharmacare coming soon.
So it's really hard to equate across national borders in terms of living costs, but I guess my point is living costs can be so dramatically different. I suspect that making $100k in Palo Alto makes a person much poorer than someone making $25k in rural Arizona.
Farmers who do human smuggling and steal labors passports in order to force people to work for nothing are a problem both about regulation and enforcement (and ethics). It the exact same problem in construction, cleaning, prostitution, and so on. Those industries can exist without human smuggling, and the bad actors only serve to make it worse for everyone.
Berry farms in Scandinavia do however have a problem with distribution. Most farms are located very far away from the consumer, with the distributor taking more than the major portion of the profits. The accounting can quickly look a lot better when a farming do not need to sell to gross distributors for 1/10th of the value of the product. Solving cheaper distribution and storage are possible, but is more similar to the issue of creating a competitor to Windows. Margins for farmers do not need to be that thin, but creating storage and distribution chains are complex when dealing with such perishable goods.
So the farmer has no variables to change because the problem is not in their jurisdiction, but rather the government's, no? (i.e. breaking up giant agri-businesses, or taxing them and redistributing to subsidize small operations)
But I recognize there's also geopolitics of food, so there are many layers I don't understand :)
A race to the bottoms, however, does sound like a wholesome family activity.
(Apologies for the grammar nerdery; I mainly want to make the joke.)
I'm all for setting price minimums on agriculture IMHO. We have such an excess of food already that, combined with food banks and stamps, I'm not concerned about people going hungry. Most of the expensive shit is from processing and logistics seems to be the biggest issue with food scarcity (there's a reason meals on wheels exists)
If farmers couldn't afford to pay reasonable wages _and_ turn a profit, then, at the system level, the externality of those lost wages is being paid somewhere else _by_ someone else. We're just not recognizing that externality or worse, it's being hidden.
And frequently in situations like this, where people aren't being paid livable wages, they turn to theft and other crimes. So one of the "externalities" we're talking about here is an increased crime rate. We then pay police to try to curb that, who are remarkably inefficient at reducing crime, so we have to over-pay to try to achieve that goal.
If, instead, we formally recognized that externality and addressed it at the source -- for instance, like the parent poster suggested, by subsidies (which would almost certainly be cheaper than the increased police budget that addressing that externality would otherwise demand in our current climate) -- then farmers could pay reasonable wages and keep or even increase their margins to a comfortable level. It's not in our best interests to keep farmers poor or just scraping by either!
Also, the US's Midwest has one of the best lands in the world for farming, there's zero need to farm in the deserts from the country's (not the rich farm owners') perspective.
That's true of everything from banks to shops to restaurants to tech companies and farms; if they're not viable businesses, then either the proprietor pays to keep them open out of their own pocket, or they shut down and make room for companies that are viable.
And yeah, if society values the work enough but it isn't profitable to do, then the answer is that the government or some other organisation funds it, not that people get exploited or rules get relaxed to make it 'viable'.
I hope that with universal basic income we will be able to bring back market forces to food production instead of relying to artificial incentives for the farmers.
The price point is determined by the costs involved. If everyone had to pay employees decently, the price would adjust.
Their point was that if it was significantly cheaper than their number, the owners most likely didn't pay minimum wages or some similar shenanigans was going on.
I've often since thought other groups, like farmers, should do something similar. I've got no clue how much a small basket of strawberries should cost for the farmer to make a decent living and the pickers to get a decent salary. Same with most other things I buy in the grocery store.