alt Hacker News> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.
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Surely the null hypothesis isn't "The USA would have a domestic industry for every crop known to man if not for external factors"
The exact growing conditions for olive production aren’t common in the US, so most of the production comes from California - west of Sacramento and south along the San Joaquin river. There are a lot of barriers in bringing specialty crops to market related to know-how and contracting sale of product, so even in other areas where growth may be possible it may be infeasible.
An olive tree reaches the peak of its productivity after 15 years and can live for several centuries.
An adult tree can be so expensive that there are cases of theft. It takes a heavy truck and a tree puller to steal an olive tree.
Hard for me to believe that even with a surplus of domestic production that comparative advantage of importing still wouldn't be better.
Almost all the olive oil in my local Costco comes from California
You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.
There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.