Posted on 09/18/2011 7:45:00 AM PDT by hedgetrimmer
The biggest threat to California's historic olive industry isn't the bad weather, disease, prohibitive harvesting costs and fierce competition already taking their toll, growers say: It's the federal government.
The United States has promised Morocco - one of California's main competitors - hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to stimulate agriculture in that country, including rehabilitating its more than 1 million acres of existing olive trees and planting 150,000 additional acres. This while California, the only state to commercially produce olives, has been battling Morocco and Spain for the black table-olive and olive-oil markets in this country for more than a decade, local growers said.
"We're struggling to survive, only to find out that our own country is subsidizing the very place that could put us out of business," said Dennis Burreson, who with his three sons has 500 acres of Manzanillo and Sevillano table-olive trees in Orland (Glenn County). He hopes that his grandchildren will someday run the farm, but worries that California olive growers could be a dying breed.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Our communists empire on the move again. All hail King Obama!
Morocco is Muslim. And filled with America haters. Perfect.
FUBO
Obama has not met a muslim country he doesn’t help.
Given that California is one of the most liberal states in our union, with liberal representation, this demonstrates that Obama does not give a damn about his party.
All of this needs to be put into a narrative by the Republicans to drown out the 1st Idiot’s attempt to paper over his daily incompetence.
Zero comes out with a jobs plan, Pubbies step up to the microphone and hit him over the head with a litany of idiotic deals such as this right down to Solyndra and the Gibson fiasco. Rinse and repeat.
“I came to Casablanca for the waters...”
This is nothing new - the US has spent the entire postwar period building up overseas competitors and granting them preferential one-way trade treatment.
Remarkable.
Is it just me but does the defense in the article make no sense?
It says the California growers aren’t making enough to meet local demand anyways and the Moroccan olives aren’t exported directly to the US either. Yet, markets like these are intrinsically linked. California olives no doubt cost more than cheap foreign olives and would thus produce only as much as the price-demand ratio held. So cheapening up Moroccan olives would have the effect of driving down prices for foreign olives and thus lower demand locally... thus reducing the olives sold by Californian makers.
I mean, that’s my quick economics thinking on it but I don’t see how supposed gov’t intellectuals could overlook this.
I haven’t read the whole article. But if you take this story in conjunction with others - such as the shutting off of the water in the San Joaquin Valley - it starts to sound like the goal is to move the California agricultural industry from here to the globe - redistribution of jobs, aka “leveling the global playing field.” If they want to move our jobs and shut down jobs, they did it with the oil industry in the gulf, and they probably thought nobody would complain about CA AG - if nothing makes sense, always look to the main agenda and see if it fits. those are my thoughts.
To me this is the stuff that pokes holes thru all the big butt unions huff and bluff. Our federal govt is destroying an industry that could possibly be dues paying union workers somewhere down the road if they aren’t already.
Hear any peeps out of them? Nope, you sure don’t.
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