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Wheat is absolutely a cash crop
cash crops are specifically not eaten as food though, that what makes growing a shitload of cash crops a bad idea and a cause for famine
If the wheat were 100% being used for shit like biodiesel it would be a cash crop, but it's not
If "wheat is a cash crop" were true the same would be true for rice and at that point the phrase is literally meaningless because it offers no meaningful distinction
Edit: the lying machine agrees with you but i disagree, it thinks the distinguishing factor is whether or not it's subsistence agriculture and I disagree because that doesn't fucking matter lol a cash crop isn't just "a crop that is grown for money" it's a crop which only has trade value for money. Otherwise every bit of excess a subsistence farmer grows and sells magically becomes "a cash crop" and there's no distinction between the end-use of what is being grown, which is what matters. Farmers planting a bunch of wheat that ends up being sold aren't "relying on cash crops" in the same way as cotton or tobacco farmers are.
A cash crop is any crop grown to sell for cash to a (foreign) market, not "non-edible" crops.
No it isn't
It literally is. You've invented a fake definition.
No, you people just don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Under your definition literally any crop grown and sold is a cash crop, but that isn't true. You're the ones offering a muddier, useless definition, defining literally any crop ever sold as a cash crop. Rice isn't a fucking cash crop. If you've ever heard it being defined as a cash crop, you're being fucking lied to. It's a staple food produced primarily to fucking feed people, and it doesn't just magically stop being that just because you produce an extra pound of it and sell that shit to someone else. The commodification and sale of a fucking crop is not what makes it a fucking cash crop!
I have literally never my fucking life heard "Cash crops" to refer to anything other than shit like tobacco, cotton, corn for biofuel, etc., you people are just straight up fucked to death wrong here.
What's really fucking ironic is lol I'm pretty sure that this exact thing, American wheat sold for imperialist purposes, is intended to force reliance on american food imports so that other countries have to have comparatively higher proportions of cash crops instead, feeding the west raw materials while increasing precarity for the developing world
You know why they're in greater precarity? Because they're GROWING CASH CROPS, and the U.S. can TURN OFF ITS EXPORTS, which matter BECAUSE THEY'RE EXPORTING STAPLE FOODS AND NOT FUCKING CASH CROPS
Stop fucking bothering me over shit you're this wrong about
Find a single source using your definition and not mine/ours.
I literally have the high ground and I'm prepared to cut off your legs as you flip around trying to say "I DON'T NEED TO SOURCE IT, YOU SOURCE IT" and then I spam you with every dictionary, article, Wikipedia article. Leaving you to smoulder and moulder in this thread.
No thanks i'll just block you
https://anthropologyreview.org/anthropology-glossary-of-terms/cash-crops-grown-for-sale/
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cash-crop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_crop
Try feeding your entire family, let alone an entire society on cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, sugarcane, and cocoa.
There is an obvious difference between wheat, even if grown for sale, and crops like indigo.
The leverage on farmers to produce surplus for cash payment is the problem, not that "non-food crops" is somehow more exploitative than food crops. In India, had they grown wheat instead of cotton they still would have starved because the taxes levied on them by the british government would have forced them to sell it off anyway.
Food dependency is intimately linked with sovereignty, a state that cannot feed itself except by exporting cash crops to Western states is in a materially different position to once that focuses on food sovereignty.
The IMF knows this, so should we.
they're still food dependant no matter what they're growing
it's literally a cash crop to the farmer if they're making money from the us gov't subsidies. i think people here think "cash crop" is an intrinsic quality of the item and not a social relation, as per Marx et al.
Find a source using your made-up definition. If you want to make a new term for it go ahead, but do not pretend it's what cash crop means and has meant forever.
Corn and wheat, famously so profitable the government pays no subsidies for farmers to grow them at all.
https://www.agrolatam.com/crops/nigeria-us-wheat-kansas-trade-mission/
Referent to my other point - the US government subsidises it's own unprofitable wheat farmers, who dump their excess on the global market in return for cash crops grown by Kenyan farmers (encouraged by the IMF demanding elimination of domestic Kenyan subsidies), fostering dependence on Western markets.
Still waiting for an actual source here.
Just catching up but I wanted to chime in that I agree with you on this one. Or at least, my exposure to the term in the past matches yours.
It's certainly not useful in modern industrial agriculture where every crop is being sold for market. Wikipedia says the term is used to differentiates from a "staple crop" i.e. what a farmer grows to eat for themselves. But staple crop redirects to "staple food" all of which are grown as ~~commodities~~ cash crops so it's an inconsistent mess.
I think our schools just taught us wrong.
Thank you abracadaniel, i think ive acted belligerently enough about this that i don't deserve vindication but i do appreciate your opinion and agreement
I really wanted to post something like "chat, help, I've been trying to subsist on all my tobacco and cotton but i can't, do you think it might have anything to do with any sort of intrinsic quality of these crops, like, that I might need to trade them for cash or other necessities, like they're some sort of... cash... crop?" post but i also really don't wanna keep arguing about it
If you accept capitalism/wealth extraction is the natural state of the world, I’m sure calling it a cash crop starts to look like a meaningless distinction. (I’m not saying you do, but I also won’t say you don’t given the context)
I believe it’s worth noting that the mode of agricultural production that gives us wheat as a mass export commodity (often used as a tool for imperialist leverage against colonised peoples) does so for the sake of profit and not to feed humans.
It's still not a cash crop though, you're never goingto have a shitload of farmers growing wheat going OH NO WE OVER LEVERAGED INTO CASH CROPS AND NOW THERES A FAMINE
I’ll take “what’s the Irish famine?” For 500
That's also not the Irish famine though.
Irish peasants grew potatoes because it was more or less the only thing nutrient dense enough to sustain them, due to ever decreasing lot-sizes. Then potato blight + English landlords forcing continued export of food, despite an ongoing famine.
Arguing that someone is willing to pay for food, thus all crops are cash crops is like arguing capitalism has been around forever because people traded in the middle ages
No don't you understand, potatoes are just a cash crop because they were sold for cash! I blocked the guy
fucking exactly, this definition of cash crop literally would define any surplus of any crop as a cash crop. Your farm produces enough rice to sell? Ah you're growing cash crops!! I'm getting angry that i even need to argue this
Real cash crops have never been tried, youre just talking about cash croporatism.
Anyway Yeah I need breaks from hexbear once in a while due to how users like to act, so I can relate
Sorry Im probably one of those users. Blame the devs though, I still need a disable inbox replies so i can stop being so mad about stuff on the internet, definitely not a me problem
We're all those users at different times. (Except for me of course). No worries
Irish tenant farmers grew potatoes as a subsistence crop, while the wealthy landlords grew wheat and oats as a cash crop to export. It is in fact a great illustration how growing food by itself will not stave off a famine when the social relation demands that thousands must starve for a few to get even wealthier.
Re: your last point, I have been careful not to blame capitalism specifically in this thread. Wheat was grown as a cash crop in Ancient Rome. The development of the slaver latifundia system leading to the economic marginalisation of the plebeians was a major source of class conflict in their society.
Weird how Ive never heard the Irish famine being blamed on "potatoes are a cash crop" until now as you nerds attempt to reinvent the term
Potatoes were the subsistence crop you smug ignorant dipshit. The landlords exported tons of and tons of wheat, barley and oats as cash crops even as thousands died from a preventable famine.
Go read my initial comment and tell me why might someone want to center the profit motive for crop production when discussing colonisation and global food security on a communist forum. It’s almost as if who owns the land and who chooses what to grow and where to send it has some bearing on the topic.
But no, you misunderstood a term and when corrected had to make it an entire thing instead of just learning and moving on. Also, miss me with the cope about AI hallucinations telling you you’re wrong. Maybe switch off the Forest Burninator 5000 and go look up a static resource to find out this is a term with decades of established use.
BTW the distinction you’re thinking of is food crops vs industrial crops.
there is no need to get confused about it, a cash crop is just the literal definition of a commodity. a thing produced with the explicit purpose of being sold.
You're wrong
all crops that are harvested and sold are cash crops, or just commodities.
Yes. “We grow food for profit” is a simple statement but absolutely not a neutral one. I feel like I really shouldn’t have to explain this on lemmygrad of all places.