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I wasn't referring to canned foods and I never buy food at walmart, but personally I do blame some stores for not taking a proactive role in supporting local farmers in the absence of the much-needed policy changes at the top. If someone can do more to support the growth of our local agriculture, they should, and where they can't, we need to make it so that they can. Otherwise time is going to continue to pass and if the supply line is ever cut off we will have a great deal of trouble doing the years of work that should have been done previously to build island self-sufficiency.
Tropical fruits are cheap from South America because the workers and farmers there are paid poverty wages in terrible working conditions; favoring their exploitation in order to ignore the valid needs of local farmers to meet the cost of living in Hawaii is not a noble thing IMO. But it isn't always a matter of something being cheaper; as I said, sometimes these grocery stores simply carry foreign produce when local counterparts would be available to them if they just had a broader array of sources, or they just stock imported, terrible tasting hass avocados when we clearly have enough local supply. As far as looking better, the finished product is overall going to be less expensive if the farmer doesn't have to reject and throw away every fruit or vegetable that has blemishes on it, and it will taste better if the farmer doesn't have to exclusively grow varieties that are primed for shipping and a sterile supermarket appearance. Truth told, tastewise, the irridated, chemically ripened fruit imported from south america doesn't come anywhere near the products grown on our islands, neither do the moldy mainland sweet potatoes.
But if we need cheap, then we could either subsidize local agriculture to make it cheaper in our markets, or we could raise tariffs on imports, or do a combination of both along with a wide slew of other options for how to jump start our local agriculture.
Plus when they import crops that we grow they are more likely to import pests specific to those crops. There is now a coffee borer beetle in Kona which if they hadn't been importing beans to mix with the Kona beans probably wouldn't have arrived in Kona.
I agree with the general sentiment, but the example given is probably not valid. Although nobody knows how the infestation started, the coffee borer is a pest of coffee cherries, not of green coffee beans. Experts believe the borers probably arrived in the clothing or luggage of people traveling from infested coffee growing areas, rather than in sacks of green coffee beans.
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