The cold chill of mid December just begins to fade as you walk through the heated store towards the produce section. Perhaps it’s a transient phase of health consciousness, perhaps it’s for a family meal, perhaps you were just feeling it. Regardless of why you decided to buy asparagus, it was there at the store, fresh, cleaned, bunched up neatly with purple rubber bands, and on sale for less than a few dollars. Now a days, that is unsurprising. In fact, it would be surprising for any given grocery store to not carry asparagus at any given time of year. Despite not being a product that most people buy regularly, despite only lasting a few weeks under refrigeration, despite being a complicated crop to grow, despite the fact that it likely saw more of the earth in its lifetime than most human beings ever will, those green stalks are there for you when you need them at an affordable price.
But how does it happen? There is no asparagus fairy that causes it to magically appear on your local grocer’s shelves. While asparagus can theoretically be grown all year in the U.S., it is typically uneconomical to do so. The work of asparagus growing is exported to more ideally situated places both geographically and economically such as Mexico or Peru. In fact, the humble green stalks you enjoy at dinner from time to time serve as the main economic justification for the existence of many small agricultural cities in these countries. Peruvian asparagus exports exceeded $370 million in 2018, eclipsed only by Mexican asparagus exports at nearly $400 million in the same year. A drop in the bucket in comparison to the exports of other commodities and services, but nevertheless the very fountain of wealth that allows farmers in these countries to afford lifestyles far superior economically to those prior to mass asparagus cultivation. Once this asparagus is harvested, it is cleaned, labeled, packaged, packed into parcels, and shipped to the United States and other countries, typically by sea. Once it clears the various regulatory hurdles imposed on agricultural imports, it is transported to a grocer’s distribution center. Then, it boards another truck to be delivered to your local grocery store where it will sit on a refrigerated shelf until it is either sold to you or discarded. Sounds complicated but that’s only half of the story.
There is a whole system of speculation and price determination that ensures your grocer’s stock of asparagus is priced competitively with other local grocers, as well as low enough that you, the consumer, will buy it. You may find Asparagus from Mexico on the shelf one week and Asparagus from California the next depending on where the lowest price and highest quality crop can be sourced. This may even mean the grocer taking a loss on the asparagus if only to have it available should a consumer come in looking for it. This, of course, means that the supply of asparagus produced by these various countries and the farmers within them can not be insufficient lest the price become undesirably high, or excessive lest the price be driven down so low that cultivating the crop becomes uneconomical. Furthermore, competitive import prices across the world contribute to the net value of the crop not only in terms of direct price paid at the store, but also the production value for the individual farmer and export value for the country at large. Additionally, if there is a crop failure in a particular region or a mass recall due to a processing error or pathogenic contamination, not only will the availability of asparagus for purchase be affected, but communities whose economic wellbeing depend on this crop will be affected as well.
Despite all this, your little bunch of fresh asparagus costs you, the consumer, hardly a fraction of a typical hour’s wage. A miraculous invention such as inexpensive fresh asparagus available on demand is only possible through the complexity of free market competition. Small farming operations only expand into foreign markets because of demand and the potential for profit. Innovative farming methods are devised to drive down cost and protect the natural resources that permit such agriculture to occur.
In fact, many of the most fundamental items on which human society depends every day exist within equally complex, if not exponentially more complex, networks of exchange and competition. Consider the device on which you are reading this very article. It was likely designed in the United States, China, or Japan; composed of aluminum from Australia, cobalt from Africa, neodymium and gadolinium from China, glass from America; all assembled into different components such as semiconductors and screens in places like Taiwan or the Philippines; then finally pulled together into a complete phone in China, only to be shipped to the U.S. for sale. Each element has its own complicated pricing system impacted by factors such as supply, government regulation, social unrest, cost of transportation, worker strikes, humanitarian concerns, tariffs, so on and so on. Despite being an unfathomably complex piece of machinery produced with equally complex components, this highly reliable device is affordable at a consistent price to nearly everybody.
Only through these complicated networks can common objects like a cellphone, a gas-powered car, or printer be made available not only to the ultra rich, but to common people as well. Close to five billion individuals worldwide currently have access to a cellphone. Twenty years ago, that level of access would have seemed unfathomable. Undoubtedly, some of these new cell phone owners also played a role in producing that asparagus you bought earlier.
Global trade not only drives the expansion of technological advancement, but it allows the benefits of this advancement to penetrate into all corners of human society. Competition ceaselessly forces costs down while providing widespread economic benefits. In the last 30 years alone, the number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased by nearly two billion.
Even as population increases, inflation rises, and the nominal price of goods also increases; the actual cost of goods in terms of hours of labor continues to plummet. In 1919, for example, one pound of ham would have cost the average unskilled American worker 2.27 hours of labor. In 2019, it costs only .24 hours. In 1956, the same worker would have had to have worked 203 hours to afford a rudimentary air conditioning unit. In 2019, a much more efficient air conditioning unit can be purchased for around 5.56 hours of labor. There are now 1.6 billion air conditioning units globally with the largest projected growth over the next decades in countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. Something as simple as lighting a household for five months cost 60 hours of labor in 1920. Now, 60 hours of labor can keep an average household lit for 52 years. Keep in mind also that these changes have occurred not over centuries, but over the course of a single human lifetime.
Of course, cost is not the only factor. Today, a large number of people of diverse economic backgrounds can have almost any product from almost anywhere around the world shipped to them in under three days. Companies like Amazon have, with the help of ever increasingly sophisticated technology, revolutionized the way much of the world shops, dramatically reducing both the cost of shipping goods as well as the time consumers spend procuring them. In real terms, consumers spend less money and less time purchasing from an exponentially more diverse catalogue of globally sourced products. Not only does this give the consumer much greater access to the world economy, but it also provides such access to sellers all over the world. Each item sold anywhere throughout the world is made somewhere, providing tangible economic benefit to its producers, enhancing the life of the consumer at a lower cost, and facilitating this exponential drive towards greater innovation and vastly improved quality of life across the globe.
Global free enterprise has been the decisive factor in raising a majority of the world’s population out of extreme poverty. Not only has it provided humanity with something as absurd as cheap fresh asparagus available all year, but it has enabled more people than ever to live a life of dignity and prosperity. It is no secret that there is a long way to go in creating a more humane global economy. However, it is only because of ever increasing levels of global trade, more complex markets, and international economic interdependency that the immense advancements of the last century were made possible.
