The "cost" of imports

One of Ned's tasks is to, once a week, act as volunteer sanitizer for his local food co-operative. Today, he had occasion to observe a fascinating plastic tub that had been left to be sanitized and reused. It had contained dried vegetable chips, which immediately piqued Ned's interest, which his friends will appreciate knowing Ned's penchant for healthy foods. Upon more careful observation, Ned observed that the chips were, as he suspected, imported, in this case from Taiwan and Vietnam. Now as a rule Ned has no objection to imported items as such, but in this case he began to muse on the question of why, as the "garden of the world," this country couldn't produce its own dried vegetable chips. Ned's explanation is as follows:
First, drying vegetables is energy intensive, so those countries that subsidize energy use or that do not require state of the art pollution controls on power plants will have an inherent advantage.
Second, obviously in the case of Vietnam the labor cost are very low, even given the swarms of illegal immigrants working for pittances in America's fields.
Third, shipping costs for dried vegetables would be very low, since the water has all been taken out. Moreover, some of Ned's friends will be aware that transocean shipping is heavily subsidized, in that countries are forbidden by international treaties from taxing cargo fuel.
And finally, that fuel, called "bunker fuel" or fuel oil number 6, is the cheapest fuel available, because virtually none of the sulfur has been removed in the refining process. As a result its pollution load on the ocean and on coastal communities is very high. In some coastal cities in Oregon and California, around a third of the air pollution is from offshore vessels.
In short, because of subsidies, it is probably cheaper to dry vegetables in Vietnam and transport them 6,000 miles or more by cargo ship to America than it is to ship the same vegetables by train or diesel truck, using taxed, refined and purified fuel, from California to Oregon, a distance of 600 miles or less.
But Ned continues to recommend dried vegetable chips, even imported ones, as a health food if one is not burdened by such concerns.