I find your confusion ... confusing. I think I explained this above, but I will recap. Luxury food displaces subsistance food on some land, therefore more expensive land must be brought into production.
Well, what you are actually doing here is appealing to a flawed economic theory. Specifically, it is ‘class analysis’ (luxury vs subsistence, in this case) and it failed to account for relative prices and values for both goods and services. In short, by failing to analyze consumer actions it became impossible to determine the driving force for market prices, which is not as you have claimed a value linked to production cost, but rather the value consumer action assigns to a product. To claim the price of beans must increase because development costs are necessarily higher neglects to address several points;
First is the notion of ‘luxury food’ itself. What you consider a luxury might easily be a staple for another group. You would have to show better support than you have shown to make credible the distinction of classes being appealed to.
Second is that an economy is not static, where all the necessary land a community requires can be assumed to have already been developed and therefore luxury food must be a driving force behind the need for development of new lands. The truth is that new lands are continually under development, as they always have been, to satisfy not only expanding population growths but also; consumer demand, failure of soil to support a desired crop, etc. This fact alone would muddy your claim by making determination of price increases due to what you’re stating extremely difficult to pinpoint.
Third is that costs of development are always a factor requiring consideration when contemplating an undertaking. Growers may always be free to speculate, and hope, for increasing returns by projecting higher market prices in the future, but the more sensible approach is to consider what the market has shown a history of paying for a product, what it is currently paying, then determine what an investment of capital is likely to bring in return, how long until development costs have been paid back, an so forth. That is to say, it would be foolish to initiate a development scheme with the notion that consumers are going to be forced to pay you more for
your beans than they will for someone else’s simply because it costs you more to produce. It is consumer action that is the real driving force at work, not production costs, and this is what economists such as Ricardo failed to realize.
Forth, and to ignore the economic theory you’re appealing to was in fact determined to have been false, your view can also be seen to ignore what the actual price received for selling subsistence farm land to some ‘elite’ grower might be (could substitute a sky rise developer in place of ‘elite’ grower, if one so desired). It does seem to be a view the selling price will be insufficient to cover the costs for developing new land. This looks more like mysticism than economics as we are not in a position to know that this will in fact be the case. The farmer might ‘make a killing’ whereby he is able to purchase a new piece of equipment enabling him to be more productive than ever before on new lands…
The reason those fields were not in production before is that the cost of operating those fields was too high to warrant planting in them - due to irrigation needs, low mineral content etc.
This is unsupported assertion. It assumes all the ‘good’ farm land has already been developed. Aside from the fact that undevelped good farm land exists, there are too many other considerations being overlooked as to why most land remains to be developed for agricultural purposes to assume only this can explain things.
For your view to hold, you must assume that while there are people who are starving due to economic factors, no one in the world is on the borderline - nobody is just getting by, or failing to just get by. This would be a coincidence of staggering proportions.
For your view to hold, a multitude of assumptions are made in conjunction with appeal to a failed economic theory of value. Your view overlooks many issues in order to run down a narrow string of possibilities such to arrive at an erroneous conclusion and is simply not a view worth entertaining. It does so while simultaneously ignoring more realistic and easier seen extrapolations that can be made, for example, such as considering the effect of inflation on purchasing power (which I attempted to engage you on earlier). Now, if you had stated; every time I vote Republican or Democrat I support a system that diminishes purchasing power of a poor starving man’s dollar, well, I probably wouldn’t have disagreed with you, haha.
