Tbh, I’m not convinced that this would really happen. There’s not that much price elasticity to a lot of agricultural products. If the strawberries cost too much, most people will just not be able to afford strawberries and thus will just not buy them but instead buy less labour-intensive produce instead.
One could argue that if strawberries cannot be produced in a way that earns everyone involved a living wage then we shouldn’t produce strawberries, and that’s a totally valid point to argue.
It’s also fair to argue that we need to cut out capitalism’s inherent inefficiency of having to feed the capitalists in the process who did contributed nothing in terms of labour. But on the one hand, this hasn’t worked out that great in the past and on the other hand this would require more of a change than to just kick out migrants.
What would be more likely to happen (since we’ve seen it happen during Covid already) is that the wages will go up, but the locals still won’t do the work, thus strawberries will rot on the fields, the shelves will be empty, the prices will go up, but not enough to cover the losses for the farmers and the farmers will plant something less labour-intense next season.
(Wages would have to go way, way up before people will voluntarily quit their job in an AC’d office to work on a field.)
Tbh, I’m not convinced that this would really happen. There’s not that much price elasticity to a lot of agricultural products. If the strawberries cost too much, most people will just not be able to afford strawberries and thus will just not buy them but instead buy less labour-intensive produce instead.
One could argue that if strawberries cannot be produced in a way that earns everyone involved a living wage then we shouldn’t produce strawberries, and that’s a totally valid point to argue.
It’s also fair to argue that we need to cut out capitalism’s inherent inefficiency of having to feed the capitalists in the process who did contributed nothing in terms of labour. But on the one hand, this hasn’t worked out that great in the past and on the other hand this would require more of a change than to just kick out migrants.
What would be more likely to happen (since we’ve seen it happen during Covid already) is that the wages will go up, but the locals still won’t do the work, thus strawberries will rot on the fields, the shelves will be empty, the prices will go up, but not enough to cover the losses for the farmers and the farmers will plant something less labour-intense next season.
(Wages would have to go way, way up before people will voluntarily quit their job in an AC’d office to work on a field.)