What was the problem with growing cash crops?

Question

such as tobacco

Answer 1

Supply and demand 101. If no one wants it or demands it anymore, your whole time and effort in growing the crops was wasted. Also cash crops tend to fluctuate, meaning one summer they can be worth a lot and other summers you end up losing money. Famous cash crops are tobacco in colonial America (1700's). Also the sugar trade during the time. Those business's made tons of money because they used slave labor. Now days its a lot harder to be a cash crop farmer. Most farmers make money because the government pays them to grow certain crops they need.

Answer 2

Pesticides, pesticides, and can I say...pesticides.   Larger crop areas means more insects are attracted to the area, which means more pesticides have to be used. These bugs then create a resistance to the pesticides which in turn calls on more toxic pesticides to be used. Another issue: people losing their land to commercial agricultural and not being able to have land to plot for themselves. This leads to massive poverty and starvation. This leads to development projects funded by the World Bank and other organizations loaning money to 3rd world development projects. The end result: massive debt burden and starving citizens while others pockets get fatter. In all honesty it's not the cash crops themselves, it's the way they are being distributed and handled.

Answer 3

The thing is, cash crops would have been fine, except that they weren't handled right. You can't go wrong with food crops, because you eat most of what you grow yourself. But when everyone started growing crops that they sold, they were all growing the same thing, and they were all selling most of it: tobacco. Furthermore, when, as a previous answerer said, the supply began to outweigh the demand, the price of tobacco plummeted. Then, instead of planting a more valuable crop (such as cotton, which was much more work to grow), the farmers just planted MORE TOBACCO, and just made the problem worse.

Answer 4

I don't know that there has ever been a problem with it.