The median income of a small farm, as of 2012, was negative $1,500 a year. A lot of that is because of global competition from overseas. I grow greenhouse tomatoes, the price of which is now half what it was before competition from Mexico was allowed. The other two crops that kept greenhouses in business were fall mums and Christmas poinsettias. Both of them are no longer profitable to grow.
I realize that global competition is the future of every product, but my problem is that US farmers face excessive regulation and inspection rules that overseas producers do not. If I want to call my tomatoes "organic," I have to be inspected by the government. That is unless I cross the border to Mexico and grow them there. Then I have zero inspection or regulation, as well as a lot more pesticides available to use that are not even legal in the US. It is a violation of NAFTA for the US to raise any questions about the authenticity of labeling of imported products. When it's twice as profitable to lie on the label, and there's no repercussions or even chance of getting caught, why shouldn't every food importer be lying? To do otherwise would be a poor business decision.
One of the things I've noticed about the grocery store is that there are entire aisles dedicated to foods that people would do best to avoid. There's an aisle for chips, another for soda, one for cookies, another for bread. Those are the most profitable products to sell. There's only a few cents worth of potatoes in a $3 bag of chips, and about the same few pennies of corn syrup in a $5 12-pack of soda.
There's 46 million Americans on food stamps right now, that's 19.7% of the country. And how many of them are obese? I'd guess at least a majority. But we're still giving them welfare money to buy soda pop and junk food. The only winners in this scenario are the companies that sell the junk food.
And back to Chinese food production, if you buy tilapia or freshwater prawns from China, it most likely was fed fresh manure as the main component of its diet. The Chinese are allowed to use antibiotics on fish farms. A few buckets of fresh pig sh!t would kill a lot of fish in a pond, but they throw in a handful of antibiotics with it, and the fish are able to live. Sometimes they use fresh duck or chicken sh!t if that is easier to get than pig sh!t. I would guess that with the US now buying Chinese chicken, there will be a lot more chicken sh!t going around China to use as feed on fish farms.
