Commentary: Town & Country

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A few weeks back we offered the thought that it would be wise for economists, government agencies and anyone else with a desire for a healthy economy to reconsider the value of jobs in the retail trade or restaurant business.

Not every job at a restaurant is a dead-end for some burger flipper destined to be replaced by a robot. There’s upward mobility and pathways to entrepreneurial endeavors within the restaurant business.

And not every retail job is at a mall that’s on its way to being redeveloped into something else. The higher end of the retail business can be richly rewarding.

Here’s something else we believe is worthy of reconsideration – the interrelationship between our urban economy and the agricultural economies of other parts of our state and nation.

Town and country matter to each for reasons more than the fact that city folk eat a lot of what country folk produce.

There are many other links that merit consideration. Farm produce tends to be packaged, which requires containers. It tends to be shipped, which requires rolling stock and fuel and logistics. It sometimes gets exported, and that often means a sea port is necessary. It tends to get promoted – often by a marketing firm.

It’s not hard to figure where rural Californians are likely to go to fill such needs. City folk might be the best customers for farmers – but those farmers buy plenty from urban manufacturers and service providers.

Any doubts about the broad strokes of this contention will be dispelled by the piece on the opposite page, authored by two professors from Fresno State University. They zero in on the interrelationship between urban and agricultural locales with a look at what the strawberry means to the community of business in urban precincts of Southern California.

We don’t know the political leanings of the Fresno State professors – and we find it admirable that they can’t be readily discerned from their writing on this subject.

We do note that the study arrives from the Central Valley, one of the great centers of food production – and also one of the few areas of California where President Donald Trump and the Republican Party both run fairly strong in terms of popular opinion.

We regard that as notable because of how riven our country is today, with socioeconomic differences having grown into political differences, or vice versa. It’s notable further because of California’s role in the bifurcation, with the state’s urban and agricultural regions generally split, and no shortage of political partisans out to gain by feeding this trend.

The Fresno State professors point up a fact to keep in mind amid the slings and arrows: There’s $2.7 billion a year rolling into L.A.’s economy thanks to California strawberries – and you can imagine how much more from all other crops grown in the Central Valley.

It would serve us all well to look beyond the urban-agricultural, town-country, coastal-interior gulf with a new sense of appreciation for the common ground that serves both sides well.

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