ON OUR APPETITE FOR BRAS AND LETTUCE

MARKETS FIND A WAY

Here are two unrelated and note-worthy stories that illustrate how far employers and employees will go to meet the demands of markets.

First up is this story from the Wall Street Journal via BurmaNet, titled "Desperate Burmese Labor in Thailand":

"Shortly after dawn six days a week, scores of young women scramble down a muddy track north of this border town and clamber aboard metal boats for a short trip across the Moei River, the narrow, cocoa-brown boundary between Myanmar (aka Burma) and Thailand.

The women, victims of the economic ruin visited on this country by the world’s most enduring military dictatorship, are on their way to work in a factory on the opposite riverbank in Thailand. In the late afternoon, they cross back to Myanmar.

The commute serves a global textile industry driven by powerful forces. One is the misery of the nation formerly known as Burma, home to legions desperate for work. Another is America’s appetite for low-cost lingerie.

The women work at Top Form Brassiere (Mae Sot) Co., a unit of a Hong Kong-listed company, Top Form International Ltd. Most of the six million bras it will sew at its plant along the Moei River this year will end up in U.S. stores under names like Maidenform and Vanity Fair..."

"...Globalization is reaching into the most remote and politically toxic nooks and crannies of the world economy. U.S. and European sanctions stop most Western companies from setting up shop in Myanmar. But the long arm of trade gets around the barriers in places like this border zone, by sucking labor into neighboring countries."

Next is this story from the New York Times, titled "Short on Labor, Farmers in U.S. Shift to Mexico":

"Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”

A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, more so since immigration legislation in the United States Senate failed in June and the authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants.

An increasing number of farmers have been testing the alternative of raising crops across the border where there is a stable labor supply, growers and lawmakers in the United States and Mexico said."

These two anecdotes are stark examples of the unintended consequences of policies designed to be narrow and presumably sharply defined to address specific ills perceived at the time by voters and their representatives. 

In the first, policies designed to reign in oppressive dictatorships end up resulting in increased private investment in neighboring countries, with a lot of suffering for ordinary people that then becomes a PR nightmare for public retailers and manufacturers in the U.S.. 

In the second, short-term policies designed to reign in terror and security threats, fueled by partisan politics,  result in agri-business know-how and management of the "breadbasket of the world", to be exported to neighboring countries, where over time, it'll likely help seed indigenous competition to U.S. agriculture interests over the long term.

Markets in that way tend to be like nature, they tend to find a way.

Words like "Globalization", "Sanctions", "Immigration", seem to be so much more narrowly and neatly defined as discussed by our politicians in the media. 

Each of these words seem to exist in it's own self-contained, vertically and hermetically sealed silo.  And if one has picked a side in each of these issues, we feel so self-assured in our position.

But we sometimes forget how inter-linked these words really are in the real world.  And how intensely they affect the long-term economic security of individuals and nations.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

The second example is a bit of an eye-opener. I never considered that US farmers could set up production outside of the US. It seems so antithetical to the idea that farmers are tied to the land of their ancestors.

As trade becomes ever more global and individuals travel more extensively, it becomes increasingly apparent that the issues related to trade are rooted in national identity politics. Thus we want our economic system to expand whilst retaining the different and exclusive status of our country. This is in stark contrast to say, ancient Rome, where expansion of the empire often added the populations to the empire. Those populations were by default citizens of Rome and could move to the center of the empire if they wished (and had the means). No doubt there were Romans who complained that the Greeks, Persians, Germans were overrunning the culture of Rome with their foreign gods and culture.

[Ward]

The more a govt tries to close and economy the more people find work around solutions and the same goes for culture look at how the Academie Francais has attempted to proscribe the official language while the open and esemplastic English language has become the lingua franca of the world.