Hello everybody, do you like...fruit? Do you like consuming fruit...in winter? Do
you too live on a pathetic godless rainy island that cannot grow anything exotic whatsoever?
If so: we need to talk about this photograph. Because it’s a day ending
in “Y” so someone has to get mad on the internet about one of five pictures again.
The implication of this image is that dumb idiot Argentinian pear plantation owners
spend hard earned valuable Argentinian money to ship freshly picked pears all the way to Thailand
to be packaged into these gross single use plastic containers before again being
shipped to presumably the United States. A near-complete navigation of the entire planet,
on massive container ships burning fuel and money... for some fruit. What’s that all about!?
Long story short, it’s this thing called “Comparative
Advantage” but the Wikipedia page for that is really dense and covered in equations and
only has four pictures and three of them are graphs so I’m not gonna read that.
Let’s take a look at the supply chain of pears,
and figure out at what point exactly it becomes cheaper to do all of this than the supposedly easy
way of just. Growing the pears in the US of A and packing them in the USA. Like Iowa.
And I promise I’ll try and make it funny, I know it sounds really boring, I should know I
just spent several days reading about the fucking pear industry. No, wait, Please don’t click off!
Part One: Growing a Pear OK. Some of the clever clogs among
us may have already figured out that, in most places across the world, you can grow your
own pears in your back yard. Even Sweden, where the average temperature is minus a
billion. But anyone with a fruit tree in their garden -or anyone who learned about seasons in
preschool – will know that the tree doesn’t make fruit all the time. Usually for a few weeks in
summer it makes a lot, and then it dies off again. PRO: Some weeks a year you get free fruit! Yay!
CON: You have to eat like a hundred pears in the span of a week or they’ll all go rotten and make
your house smell worse than a university dormitory kitchen. Take the fucking bins out, JESSICA.
So for the other 351 days per year if you want a nice pear and sausage smoothie you need to
buy your pears from elsewhere; perhaps a hot country where seasons barely exist
and fruit grows on trees all year round. Like Argentina, for example.
But the United States of America also grows pears. More than Argentina, in fact.
Why must the pears in this picture come from Argentina and not be home-grown,
red-blooded, freedom-loving American pears?
Because while the United States produces pears and… a lot of other things,
Argentina is still primarily an agricultural economy, and so, naturally, their government
policy is geared towards specialising in farming and food transpiration,
making their pears better and faster, even if they don’t produce as much.
In the real world, it’s kind of like getting your hair cut by your mum or by a professional barber.
Your mum does loads of stuff, of which cutting your hair is a part.
The barber does nothing but hair cutting. Ain’t it just easier to get your hair cut by a guy who
does it every day instead of someone who does it only every couple months? Is it worth the time
and money for your Mum to improve her skills in hairdressing when you’re the only person
who needs her services once every few months? No. Same principle with the fruit. The USA does not,
or should not, give any more time and money towards fostering the pear industry because
it has more important things to focus on, like iPhones and thousand dollar cupholders. They may
produce more pears, but they aren’t as efficiently made or as higher quality as Argentinian pears,
because Argentines spend all their resources towards their agricultural economy.
If you’re a supermarket and you want to get the upper hand over your competitors,
are you going to order the OK quality, reasonably cheap to grow American pears,
or the high quality, very cheap to grow Argentine pears? That’s what I thought.
And that’s why it’s better to ship fruit from across the ocean,
rather than to grow them at home.
But it doesn’t explain why they have to go all the way to ffffffucking Thailand to be packaged.
Part Two: Thailand in packed they are Why?
Good question. At face value it looks like you should really
just pack these pears in Argentina and go straight to North America
rather than all the way across the ocean to Thailand. Why the middle man?
It’s at this point that we should probably take a look at what this product in the
picture actually is. From a different angle we can see that they are pears,
yes, but chopped pears in a lemon-flavoured syrup. Fruit in syrup products are popular in
South East Asia because they don't require refrigeration and more importantly can be
used to make….Rujak. A South East Asian fruit salad eaten mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Having easy access to preserved fruits that don’t require refrigeration is crucial to developing
countries in South East Asia, like Indonesia. The packing facility in Thailand is close to
people who want packed fruits, as well as other pear producing countries like China and India.
Again though, why not pack in Argentina and ship them directly to Indonesia?
Because pears are picked roughly one to two weeks before they are ripe and are then continue the
ripening process off the branch in refrigeration —coincidentally about the time a container ship
needs to get from South America to South East Asia. If you packed in Argentina, you’d have
to wait a week or more for the pears to ripe, then pack them, then make the 21 day trip to Indonesia,
extending production time considerably. That’s just a waste of time. Meanwhile the inside of a
dark metal shipping container is naturally cold – that’s FREE ripening that can be done on the trip
there instead of paying millions for a high-tech massive pear cooling facility in Buenos Aries.
So how did these pears end up in North America? The majority of Americans don’t usually eat Rujak
and have refrigerators to store their fresh fruit.
But there’s still a demand, however small, for these packed pears.
So to provide for this demographic, American supermarkets have two options:
You could build a packing plant in the USA, take some American pears, and pack them yourself,
but because fewer people want the product, the production process would require fewer
people to operate, which is not only less efficient and paradoxically increases the cost,
but also produces more carbon dioxide per calorie processed. And believe me, big fruit
companies aren’t going to be paying people to sit around doing nothing. They’ll overthrow Latin
American governments for 2% higher profits. Or option number two, you could just buy
from the factory in Thailand, which is better for your finances and overall efficiency.
But seriously though, is it really that cheap to ship things? Yes.
Pears are 178 grams and each shipping container can hold up to 24,000 kilograms, or 135,000 pears.
Shipping one container from Asia to North America costs about $2500 or… 1.8 cents per pear.
And that is how it only costs mere pennies for companies to lug vast amounts of food across
the world, and how exotic fruit ends up on your dining table at any time of the year.
But maybe you don’t have a problem with that. Unless you’re under the age of 12,
we all like fruit. And there’s nothing wrong with getting things from abroad
that you can’t get in your own country. But maybe your contention is different;
perhaps you don’t like this supply chain...because it is bad for the environment.
Part Three: Environment the for bad that really shipping is?
Obviously, as massive coal and diesel-burning machines, cargo ships produce a lot of greenhouse
gasses that are bad for the environment. They’re trying to improve, somewhat,
by slowing down slightly so they burn less fuel, and ideas have been floated, no pun intended,
for nuclear or electric cargo ships. But don’t expect those ideas to take off. I mean, come on.
Surprisingly though, despite shipping being 80 percent of all international transport,
it only makes up 37% of transport’s carbon emissions. The King of pollution goes to
road transport which is crazily inefficient. Look at that. Trucks and lorries are less than 10%
of all international transport and they make over half of emissions.
If you’re interested as to why this is the case I’ve put a little supplementary video
on my second channel where I explain the maths behind it, go look at it if you want.
Ferrying pears halfway across the earth really is less carbon
intensive than driving it in a truck to a packing plant across your own country.
All of international shipping,
with over 5000 container ships with a combined storage capacity of 714,000 cubic
kilometres (171,249 mi3) is responsible for…. 2.5% of global emissions. You know what,
I don’t think that’s the biggest priority on the list of things that need decarbonising.
So until we invent a TARDIS, or build train bridges across the Atlantic ocean,
shipping is the best option. By far. Especially since only a tiny amount of a food’s carbon
footprint is in transportation to begin with. The rest comes from the farming process and that’s
where we need to focus on cutting emissions. Once again, this is why large Argentinian
farms are better than many smaller American farms. Larger farms can afford to invest in
green technology and reduce their carbon footprint – and statistically, they do.
So if you like buying things and you want to help out the economy
of a developing nation while being the least environmentally damaging,
be sure to buy foreign! This weird pack of pears may seem horribly inefficient,
but it really is the most efficient way to get the food you want into your mouth.