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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.
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.
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.
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