U.S. Government To Buy Up To 30 Million Pounds Of Blueberries To Combat Price Drop

Thursday, May 5, 2016

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to buy up to 30 million pounds of wild blueberries to help stabilize a drop in the price, ABC News reported on Thursday.

An unnamed member of Maine’s congressional delegation told the Associated Press that the agency will spend up to $13 million for the wild blueberries…

The government purchase came in response to a letter Maine’s congressional delegation wrote to federal agencies, saying the prices of frozen blueberries had fallen by as much as 50 percent in the last 5 years, and asking the government to buy the excess fruit for use in domestic food assistance programs…

Rep. Chellie Pingree from Maine defended the government’s action, saying it would provide a boost to the blueberry industry…

We Respond & Your Comments

Today we leave Oregon and visit The Pine Tree State for our lesson on Big Government.

We like blueberries. We know they have antioxidants that fight cancer. And we’d hate not to have blueberry farmers who supply them.

But markets reflect the relationship of supply to demand. In the case of blueberries there’s too much supply. So suppliers are hurting – maybe because they’re too many of them. But Maine’s blueberry farmers figured out a way to get Uncle Sugar to bail them out in what had become an inefficient market.

Question: When conditions for your business turned sour did the Feds bail you out? We didn’t think so. So why did they do it for the blueberry crowd? We’ll bet our blueberries that dollars and votes had something to do with it.

This is why so many voters this year are fed up with “Crony Capitalism,” where the government picks winners and losers based on dollars and votes and leaves us with the bill for their pandering.

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