Just Peachy

Main audience: USA people

Peach photo by Andrew Kittell at FreePngImg

If you are American, reasons for skyrocketing food prices are not “just” climate change and the war against Iran. The federal government is also using taxpayer money to keep prices up.

For a shining example, look at a peachy deal that hit the news in May. I missed it then. Now that I’ve noticed, I can’t take my eyes off it.

The federal government is paying up to $9 million to growers who used to supply now-bankrupt Del Monte Foods and have not been able to line up another buyer for their crops.

Is that money to find new buyers for the fruit? Export the fruit? Buy the peaches and can them for future use so the food won’t be wasted and growers won’t collapse? (The orchards produced clingstone peaches, which are for canning rather than for eating fresh.)

No. The government offered to pay growers to destroy orchards, some of which were nurtured for decades, before this summer’s harvest occurred. Up to 420,000 peach trees, gone. Three thousand acres which would have produced 50,000 tons of fruit, two thirds of what Del Monte used to buy. (Pacific Coast Producers bought Del Monte’s canned fruit business and is buying a third of the peaches its predecessor would have used.)

Why?

The government says this will reduce oversupply and prevent $30 million in losses for growers so they can “pivot” to another crop.

Pivot? Trees take years to mature enough to begin bearing fruit. Killing them creates acres of stumps not readily plowed to plant with something else. Killing them also removes some of Mother Nature’s most powerful climate moderators in a summer when climate change is burning much of the planet.

But notice the other part of the government’s rationale, reducing oversupply.

Ripping out orchards to keep 50,000 tons of canning peaches off the market keeps prices up for the owners of remaining orchards.

I skimmed lightly over the details here. The link I provided early in this post is to one of the most thorough news articles I found about it.

Alternatives

In better times I would expect that alternatives were considered before the decision to destroy so much food production. But in better times, the federal government understood such basics as how providing food to starving countries helps to reduce geopolitical instability and thereby bolster national security. Currently, federal government has tossed out as much expertise as it could and destroyed as many aid programs as it could.

I’m not in charge. But if I were, this would have been on my radar since Del Monte announced its bankruptcy about a year ago. Closure of the canning facilities involved in April of this year wouldn’t have been an emergency. It would have been a foreseen possibility… and I would have searched hard for a better solution than keeping the price of canned peaches high by destroying 50,000 tons of food and three thousand acres of climate change mitigation that took years to mature.