Mexico’s cartels to control our food supply, too?

Anybody notice who might be getting their hands on the U.S. food supply?

I found it buried in an Epoch Times story about Congress’s upcoming Farm Bill spendathon, set to go to a vote in December. It’s supposedly aid to U.S. farmers, including California’s, the U.S.’s top agricultural state, which produces much of the U.S. food supply. 

But it’s hardly a solution.

Turns out the regulatory burden is so nasty out there it’s driving farmers in California to move operations to Mexico where the already cash-fattened cartels control the farms, too.

According to the Epoch Times: 

The Manasseros said many Southern California farmers will instead relocate to Mexico to be competitive.

However, they say such economic pressures on U.S. producers may have deadly consequences by placing countries like Mexico as the top food producer for the United States.

According to Mr. Manassero, as American farmers continue to be out-competed and Mexico dominates the food market, food insecurity may become a bigger concern due to corruption interwoven with farming across the border.

“The [drug] cartels run everything down there [including] the farmers. They’re very big into the farming industry for money laundering … they would just jack up the prices [of food] to whatever they want once [American] farmers are out of business,” he said.

This isn’t just Joe Biden’s team’s doing, which, for sure is culpable enough. The state of California also has done its socialist part.

Farmers in California face a complex and unreliable web of regulations concerning water prices, and farming supplies like fertilizer, transport, and miscellaneous agricultural goods. In addition, they face higher costs for water when they can get it — being charged residential rates these days instead of agricultural rates where the water doesn’t need to be so processed clean. Obamacare forced them to cut staff to under 50, unless they could shell out for a full menu of health care insurance packages for all workers, which small farms cannot. Labor costs have soared, too, the highest labor costs in the land, the California farms being put on the same footing as mechanical factories where overtime wages must be paid. During harvest season, there’s a lot more work than during the dormant times, so instead of adjusting the wages to the sun cycle owing to the unique conditions of agriculture, farms are treated as mechanical factories, as if the sun worked like a factory and crops ripened like a uniform stamp-out machine at an even pace all through the year. Such is the “logic” of California’s blue legislators, most of whom have never been on a farm in their lives. In addition, the farms have to compete with Mexican farms, which are not subject to these regulations, and whose labor costs are about a seventh of U.S. labor costs.

That has put U.S. farmers, particularly in California, situated here on the richest soil in the finest climate anywhere on earth, and up until now, the most productive for a wide variety of foods seen in the grocery stores.

It’s all headed to Mexico, where the cartels may soon be controlling whether the crop gets harvested or not and whether the crop gets shipped to the states for sales and at what price.

Sound like a brave new world coming to us? It does to me. In addition to cartels controlling our open border, shipping untold amounts of drugs across it, engaging in mass retail theft in the states, making northern Mexico hellish with shootouts, kidnappings and mayhem, and assassinating presidential candidates further south in places like Ecuador, we now face the likelihood of cartels controlling America’s food supply.

Anybody think they’ll be nice about it?

It underlines that it’s time to give farmers a little relief so they don’t have to move operation to Mexico. Given the vile political crew entrenched here, that may be too much to ask, but we have to ask — and demand ,that they take their boot off the neck of America’s most productive farmers.

Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, via Picryl // No known restrictions on publication