Florida farmers need federal help to compete with low-priced Mexican fruits and vegetables | Opinion

At the University of Florida, we take great pride in helping farmers solve problems, whether it’s pests, weeds or drought.

But our team at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences can’t do much to ensure Florida farmers have a fair market in which to compete. Fortunately, our elected leaders are advocating for urgent political action on a problem biological science can’t solve — action I hope gets broad support and results in immediate relief.

Florida farmers who grow tomatoes, bell peppers, strawberries and blueberries compete against Mexican farmers whose government spent $4.5 billion a year in a recent decade-long stretch buying them greenhouses, equipment, machinery and irrigation technology. These supports have a direct impact on the ability of U.S. growers to compete and to stay financially viable.

In Florida, the resulting artificially low-priced produce has flooded supermarket shelves and devastated farmers. They produce half the tomatoes they did 20 years ago, when, more likely than not, the tomatoes that shoppers put in their grocery carts were locally grown. Today, consumers here are buying five times as many Mexican tomatoes as ones grown in Florida.

That’s why a bipartisan delegation led by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and U.S. Rep. Al Lawson last month petitioned the U.S. Trade Representative for an investigation into the flood of imports.

Just as we at UF/IFAS listen to and work to address farmers’ concerns about threats to growing the crop, our politicians have demonstrated that they’ve heard concerns about threats to selling the crop.

Those concerns have been delivered by the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association and the Florida Strawberry Growers Association. The folks who donated so much to Florida food banks during the pandemic, provide livelihoods to thousands of Floridians and put healthy food on our tables are hurting.

In fairness, the U.S. government also helps support agriculture — though that help has been dedicated to big commodities, such as milk and cheese, rather than specialty crops. Specialty-crop growers need help if we want states such as Florida to have a thriving agricultural economy that is able to feed our state and the nation, especially with extreme weather reshaping food production around the world.

As an organization dedicated to evidence-based decision-making, UF/IFAS supports a call by Florida organizations to determine the causes that underlie the years-long decline of U.S. producers’ market share. Economic research conducted by UF/IFAS already has documented some of the impact.

Zhengfei Guan, an economist at UF/IFAS’ Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Balm, Florida, has led the inquiry. He concluded in congressional testimony that investments in agriculture by the Mexican government have “expanded and transformed Mexico’s fruit and vegetable industry, particularly export-oriented production.”

Guan has documented a corresponding decline in market share for Florida producers in multiple commodities — tomatoes, strawberries, bell peppers and blueberries specifically — over the past two decades that he has linked to produce entering the United States from Mexico.

The aforementioned commodity associations that have applauded Rubio and Lawson’s call for an investigation have, in the past, cited Guan’s work in making the case for the urgency of action by U.S. trade regulators.

I’m encouraged that the associations entrust their land-grant university to provide the evidence-based information that can drive discussion on how to address complex challenges such as global trade.

Additional research funding would help expand our understanding of how to keep Florida growers competitive. And other measures are needed, too, such as crop-insurance reform and addressing labor shortages by making it easier to employ foreign nationals as temporary agricultural workers.

In petitioning the U.S. Trade Representative, Rubio, Lawson and their colleagues are asking the right questions. A government investigation would be an opportunity to produce the science, facts and data that document the challenge facing not just Florida farmers, but farmers in other states, too.

Then those facts can inform policy makers who have the power to help farmers nationwide focus not on politics, but on producing our food.

J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s senior vice president for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.