[FRIAM] Santa Fe's Sugar Tax

[Steven A Smith]

> Steve wrote: "...And as much as I like my year round bounty of fresh 
> fruits and veggies imported from around the world (with gawd knows how 
> much inefficiency and product waste/spoilage)"
>
> George Duncan and I were in Sri Lanka in January.  We stopped at a 
> highway produce stand in the interior part of the island.  There for 
> sale were small Red Delicious apples, the type typically seen in our 
> stores.  Those apples were imported from Washington State. Each apple 
> was priced at the equivalent of 50 cents, about what we pay here.  So 
> how does that work?
>
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon ("get off my lawn!") but  I'd say it 
*doesn't*...  the illusion that it does is probably hugely implicated in 
our current global-scale crises (climate, poverty, pestilence, bad 
made-for-TV-movies, and halitosis).

A more direct (less ranty/sociopolitical) answer might be that container 
shipping and modern preservation techniques and an imbalance of trade, 
and agricultural surpluses resulting from mega-AG in the US probably 
help to make this possible.  For example, if there is a net trade 
surplus in container count going from Sri Lanka (or nearby) to the US, 
then filling containers with Red Delish (you said they were small, maybe 
sub-par for our self-indulgent markets?) and shipping them back is 
somewhere between free and highly subsidized by whatever product 
(scarcifying rain-forest hardwoods?  Nike Sneakers?) is being shipped 
*this* way.    I suspect a fully loaded container ship *is* a little 
more expensive to push across the Pacific but maybe only by a small 
increment?

Then we have the difference in currency/wages/standard of living and in 
the US, that $.50 apple would net the seller $.25 or less here, but in 
Sri Lanka that might be an hour's wages for the people 
unloading/grading/packaging/delivering/retailing in Sri Lanka?

I'm sure someone has studied and written up lots about this somewhere... 
maybe a Journalist?  Economist?  Social Commentarian?

Is this world perhaps on the cusp of a punctuation mark in the 
proverbial "punctuated equilibrium"?   Will we have something like a 
thermal inversion  where all these false economies turn back right side 
up?  Or is this the "curmudgeon" in me thinking it is "wrong-side up".  
I suppose there are (Panglossian?) arguments to be made: "all is for the 
best" in the "best of all possible worlds 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds>". I hear 
this from many of my Trumpian friends (on topics like climate change 
denial, misogyny, etc.)

- Steve


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