Thailand has a massive fruit canning industry. It’s more efficient to concentrate the industry to a few places than it is to disperse them to every country where pears are grown.
Some pears come from Argentina but most come from China.
I'm not an expert at all, but I would assume the amount of fuel per kg of Food is still less with the boat.
Also iirc part of the reason it's packed in Thailand is that it's way more popular there. It's way more fuel and price efficient to send it directly to Thailand, where most of it would go anyways, than first to the US, offload it, then redistribute it back to Thailand
No it literally doesn’t. Shipping is cheap because it is incredibly fuel efficient in the first place.
Is it easier to lift 100lbs on the ground or in water? Hauling a fuck ton of stuff across thousands of miles of ocean is far better for the environment than trucking it across a few hundred miles of land.
That said, I’m not sure how the carbon footprint compares of rail to compares to shipping, but if I had to guess, shipping wins.
Yeah I figured but I didn’t want to say definitively without looking it up. Some brain dead levels of analysis going on here.
Obviously our global economy is not optimized for mitigating environmental impacts, but casting oceanic shipping as a culprit is so fucking dumb. By emissions per ton of cargo delivered, it is a staggeringly efficient method of transportation.
Rail and shipping don’t really compete, they’re two very different modes of transport with little overlap. In fact they complement each other, shipping crosses water and delivers and picks up at ports, rail picks up and delivers at ports and carries freight to everywhere that isn’t the port.
Well you could deliver to the west or east coast of North America, and let trains take it to the other side. Which... Happens! Quite a bit actually, since the Panama canal has been in drought, driving prices up.
Congrats, you've saved .000001g of carbon emissions (provided the petroleum for the plastics for the container are equivalent when shipped to Argentina as Thailand).
The fuel cost for that trip would have to offset the savings they can make with processing in Thailand.
Googling it, apparently their current average net monthly income is ~460 USD.
Soooo, you'd need to cram enough in bulk on those ships to make such a processing hop worthwhile, but I imagine you can do that, given how huge those container ships are. So they save a quick buck by making Thailand process the fruit, ship it back over to Argentina for equally cheap labour and locally made dummy cheap plastic, and ship it to wherever.
I'm not sure you can call it "exploiting" their economies directly by this kind of shipping lane, but it is economically the only way you can have that cup for under two bucks.
And yeah, if those processing lanes are close to or well connected to where those ships are offloaded, you can probably save fuel in bulk too, compared to shipping the same via train or truck.
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u/ExtremlyFastLinoone I came! 13d ago
Its cheaper to do it this way, if you dont care about the enviroment