[DFHippie]

You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just see it as a cost and a hassle and a totem of a hostile tribe they want to drive out of their society; but the people who are paid to rail against it are paid by interests who know well what the regulation is meant to do and know that they will be the externalizers without it. And what they're paying for is agents who will bamboozle the majority, keeping them useful, angry idiots.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not as simple as "regulation good" or "regulation bad" -- there are plenty of companies that lobby for regulation because they know it will exclude smaller competitors, or ward off lawsuits because they followed the regulations even if people still died, or they want them to get passed while their stooge is in the majority so they can draft the rules themselves and then claim that it was already done last year when someone else wants to do something more effective next year.

There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.

The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.

[primroot]

Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.

I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.

When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.

But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.

[DFHippie]

Sure. There's regulatory capture. But this particular problem, the externalization of costs, is a classic one solved by regulation rather than the free market.

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem where the pesticides are destroying native insect populations, sure. But not the problem where the tomatoes taste like nothing and have pesticide in them -- that's not an externality, it's an information asymmetry. And then it has the same problem in the legislature as the supermarket.