Sustainability issues prioritization
DANIEL R COOLEY (dcooley@titan.ucs.umass.edu)
10 May 1993 09:38:42 -0400
The message from the grad student in Hort at Minnesota prompted me to put
an idea on the electronic table. It has occurred to me, as a participant in
apple research, that the problems of sustainability in apple production in
the U.S. have much less to do with pesticides than they have to do with
labor. Perhaps I am wrong, because I don't have production budgets for
apples in Chile or Argentina, but I suspect that the labor costs there are
not even close to U.S. costs. This year, we have more apples on the world
market than we know what to do with. It's a classic case of oversupply of
an agricultural commodity. If this is a permanent trend, and at the rate
that apples have been planted in South Amer. I suspect it may be, then the
advantage will be to those who can still make money at ridiculously low
prices. Since labor is a major part of any horticultural crop, the answer
seems obvious to me.
I don't mean to oversimplify the issue or trivialize pesticide problems, but
I sense that the factor which will destroy production of horticultural crops
in this country is inexpensively produced crops from abroad. Hence, efforts
in the plant sciences which focus on production issues may not be as important,
at least in dealing with the existing crisis, as setting policy which will
address international inequities in costs of production.
Dan