Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.
In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.
Is there any food market in the developed world that is not heavily subsidized by the state?
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.
I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.
So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.
It's also said that four companies control 85% beef market in the US, which normally should make people rather queasy I would think.
But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.