Sous-titres (281)
0:00This is one of the most isolated supermarkets
on earth… but it sure doesn’t look like it.
0:06After all, it’s in Hawaii which, despite its
name-recognition and visitor count, is, by
0:11most definitions, the most remote major population
center on earth. There are more isolated islands
0:17and archipelagos and atolls, but nowhere on earth
is there a concentration of a million or more
0:23people farther from the next nearest concentration
of a million. It’s as far from Los Angeles as New
0:29York, as far from Anchorage as Norway, as far
from Japan as Afghanistan. Between Hawaii and
0:35the California coast, there’s truly nothing—no
towns, no people, not even a single island of
0:41any size save for the few just off the coast of
Los Angeles. The shortest commercial international
0:47flight from Hawaii is to a tiny atoll known as
Christmas Island, populated by just 7,000 people,
0:53and that’s an anomaly. The next nearest
is to Majuro, in the Marshall Islands,
0:57four and half hours away, but it’s not until
Fiji, a six-hour flight from Honolulu, that the
1:03population comes even close to that of Hawaii.
That’s all to say: it’s weird how normal this
1:09grocery store looks, considering where it is.
Isolation typically restricts convenience,
1:16yet look inside and the shelves are stocked
essentially exactly the same as they’d be if
1:20this was, say, a Safeway in Seattle. And
not just with the shelf-stable products.
1:26Even these bananas originate from exactly
where they would for most of the continental
1:30US—they’ve traveled from Ecuador so quickly, in
fact, that they’re not even ripe. It’s not until
1:35one looks at the prices of perishables—$10 for a
gallon of whole milk—that anything deviates from
1:41what would be the expectation on the mainland.
Hawaii is firmly integrated in the American
1:46supply chain to the extent that differences
in its retail landscape are surprisingly
1:50tough to come by. Dueling chicken retailers
Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane’s, for example,
1:55recently expanded to the state—both of which have
next to no international presence, and therefore
2:00no built-up international supply chains.
Neither has an overwhelming incentive to
2:04expand to Hawaii—it is an untapped market, sure,
but there’s nothing about the state that would
2:09make it worth it for either to develop a brand-new
system of sourcing and shipping product just to
2:14open a couple dozen additional locations. So
this is as good a sign as any that somehow,
2:20these isolated islands are so logistically linked
to the US that it’s just about as easy for a brand
2:25to expand there as anywhere in the US.
And it’s true: Hawaii’s supply chain
2:30offers a near-seamless experience
for its users—the shops, restaurants,
2:34and other businesses operating in the state. But
the supply-chain itself is anything but normal.
2:41Much of its uniqueness stems from one American
law known as the Jones Act. Its rules are simple:
2:47with little exception, only ships registered
in the US, built in the US, and staffed by
2:52Americans can transport goods between US ports.
The original idea was to protect the US merchant
2:57marine and shipbuilding industries, partially to
keep competency in case major sealift capacity is
3:02needed for a large-scale war abroad, but these
days this ends up being rather restrictive as
3:07the vast majority of ocean-going container ships
are registered in countries with favorable tax
3:11and labor policies like Panama or Liberia and
primarily staffed by mariners from low-wage
3:16countries like the Philippines or India. What
this means in practice is that the industry
3:21often ends up with exploitative labor practices,
environmentally-damaging construction processes,
3:25and other undesired externalities, but the
end result is rock-bottom operating prices a
3:31fraction of those of US ships. In fact, the cost
of operating a Jones-act compliant cargo ship is
3:37estimated between three to six times the norm.
So in a free market, these ships simply wouldn’t
3:44exist, they could never be competitive, if not for
this law. The total number of Jones-act compliant
3:50container ships in the entire world is just 23,
and all but five of those are operated by one
3:57of two companies: Matson and Pasha Hawaii.
This pair of companies represent the vast
4:03majority of inbound shipping capacity to Hawaii,
and yet they likely would not exist if not for
4:07the Jones Act. That’s because, even beyond the
normally lower operating cost of international
4:12shipping companies, there’s great asymmetry of
demand across the Pacific. In September, 2024,
4:18the average cost to ship a 40-foot container from
Shanghai to Los Angeles was about $6,000, whereas
4:23shipping the same container on the same route in
reverse—Los Angeles to Shanghai—cost just $700.
4:30That’s all down to supply and demand—North
America imports far more from Asia than Asia
4:34does from North America, so ships typically
return west with far less. Hawaii is a rare
4:40instance of westbound demand across the Pacific,
so if not for the Jones Act some international
4:45shipping companies would likely add it as
a stop on the return trip to Asia to drop
4:48off cargo on the typically-unprofitable leg.
But instead, Matson and Pasha Hawaii operate
4:54the services, charging far, far more to
move the same 40-foot container. Now,
5:00their services do differ slightly from
the global norm for container shipping,
5:03largely since, normally, container shipping is
just not a very time-sensitive endeavor. Globally,
5:08cargo ships operate at an average speed of just 15
knots, despite a typical vessel top-speed of over
5:1320. This is since ocean shipping companies compete
primarily on cost, not speed, and operating slower
5:19is more fuel efficient. Hawaii ships, meanwhile,
typically operate at over 20 knots in order to
5:25transport goods to the state in just three or four
days. Uniquely, these ships do compete on speed
5:31since they need to fit into the typical window
of time it takes to get perishable products from
5:34distribution centers to stores. These bananas from
Ecuador, for example, likely left the country on
5:39Dole’s dedicated container ship, the Dole Pacific,
up to their facility in San Diego. From there,
5:44they might otherwise spend a few days getting
trucked to a grocery distribution center in,
5:48say, Salt Lake City, wait around for a day, then
get trucked up to a grocery store in Missoula. So
5:53the route to Hawaii is not necessarily that
much longer than that to an inland state—a
5:58day or two to get up to Matson’s terminal in
Long Beach, four days to get to Honolulu. West
6:02Coast ports like Long Beach and Oakland are major
logistics hubs, and three to four day proximity
6:07to them is well within normal timeframes for
distribution. But what’s less normal is the cost.
6:14Jones-act compliant operators have to pay high
shipbuilding costs, they have to pay high labor
6:19costs, so they do what they can to reduce cost
where possible. For example, on some sailings,
6:25they’ll return to the west coast at that
slower, more efficient speed. On a recent trip,
6:29the Pasha George II left Long Beach on Wednesday
September 4th, sailed at 20 knots, then arrived
6:34in Honolulu four days later on Sunday. Following
unloading and loading, it left Honolulu on Monday,
6:40but only sailed at about 15 knots and didn’t get
back to Long Beach until the following Monday,
6:45a week later. Hawaii doesn’t export much these
days, especially in terms of perishable goods, so
6:50this slower speed is fine. As another technique,
Matson also services a unique route that helps
6:55capture eastbound demand and therefore maximize
utilization, as certain continue on to Guam. Guam
7:01is an American territory, and although it has
far lower demand than Hawaii—both due to lower
7:05population and more international imports from
nearby nations like Japan—it does still import
7:10plenty from the mainland. But after calling
at Guam, Matson’s ships don’t continue back
7:14to the US, they go on to the Japanese island of
Okinawa—which also imports plenty from the US due
7:19to the massive US-military presence there—before
continuing on to Shanghai. There, the world’s
7:25busiest container port, they’ve built a small
niche as the provider of the fastest US-bound
7:30services. While most container traffic is not very
time-dependent, on such a massive route, there’s
7:35clearly some. For much of recent history Matson
was able to provide this speed because their ships
7:40are comparatively small. Shanghai naturally is
a fairly shallow-water port, so the larger ships
7:45used by competitors couldn’t load to full capacity
there, and therefore they’d typically make another
7:50stop to load fully before continuing on to North
America. Shanghai has since artificially deepened
7:54its port, making this less so the case, but
Matson still touts speed due to faster loading
7:59times from their smaller vessel size, full 20-knot
operating speeds, and then on the US-side they
8:04operate their own dedicated terminals at ports
like Oakland and Long Beach, allowing them to
8:08avoid the kind of port congestion that reached
headlines during COVID. In fact, freight rates
8:12reached such astronomical heights during COVID
that, despite their high operating costs, Matson
8:17could briefly meaningfully compete, especially
given their speed, and they took some capacity
8:22away from Hawaii to expand service from Asia.
But now back in normal times, strategies such
8:27as their Asia service are increasingly crucial for
Matson as they get used to competition—after all,
8:32for much of its history, Matson enjoyed a
near-complete monopoly on Hawaii shipping
8:36services, and Pasha Hawaii’s challenge
since it started service in 2005 has
8:41pushed prices down and introduced genuine
competition for the first time in a while.
8:45But monopolies still exist in Hawaiian logistics.
You see, every single container from the
8:50continental US first arrives here, at the port
of Honolulu on Oahu. But Hawaii also encompasses
8:57Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island, plus a few other
more minor islands. So to get containers beyond
9:02Honolulu, one must hire a barge, and there’s one,
and only one company that offers barge service
9:08between the islands—Young Brothers. Now, Matson
does operate its own barges that connect some of
9:14its containers that originated in the mainland
to certain other Hawaiian ports, but the only
9:18carrier that is currently allowed by the state
to sell container transport services between the
9:22islands exclusively is Young Brothers. The logic
behind this state-sanctioned monopoly is that
9:27Hawaii can therefore require Young Brothers to
service unprofitable ports in sparsely-populated
9:32Lanai and Molokai. And the state also regulates
the rates Young Brothers charges, but they’re
9:37still an eye-popping sum. Transporting a loaded
container from Honolulu to any of the other ports,
9:42which typically takes about a day, costs
$1,412.89—as in, twice what shippers are
9:50currently charging to transport the same
container from Los Angeles to Shanghai. And
9:56it’s not like there are other Jones-act compliant
barge companies that could replace Young Brothers’
10:00service at moment’s notice, and the state knows
this—when, in 2020, the company came to the state
10:05and said the rates they were allowed to charge
would lead to a financial loss of $30 million,
10:10the state had essentially no option but to agree
to a 46% hike in rates, lest risk losing their
10:16only way of getting goods between the islands.
The state itself has admitted, in an audit of
10:21the company, that Young Brothers has gotten
used to being able to pass on any increase in
10:24cost to the consumers and therefore has little
incentive to be diligent in reducing them.
10:29So when you combine the geography of isolation
with federal and state legislation that restricts
10:33competition, one ends up with dramatically higher
costs than those of the mainland. Compare the
10:39prices of the Whole Foods supermarket in Long
Beach, California—closest to the port where
10:43much of Hawaii’s goods originate—and that of the
island of Maui. Now, one can find similar prices
10:49for certain shelf-stable goods—a bottle of olive
oil is just a dollar more in Hawaii, for example.
10:55But consistently, the fresher something is, the
more expensive it is versus the mainland. Ground
11:01beef goes from $6.99 to $8.99. Cabbage from $1.49
a pound to $2.79. Lemons from 89 cents to $1.49.
11:12A pack of eggs from $3.69 to $5.99.
As a state, Hawaii imports around
11:1895% of its food—there is next-to-zero in-state
production—and almost all of that food rides on
11:25one of two shipping carriers from the mainland,
then one shipping carrier between the islands.
11:30There certainly are edge cases—a small portion
of food gets flown in by plane, there are some
11:34imports from abroad—but in sum, there’s
incredible reliance on one single logistics
11:40system with uniquely, artificially high costs.
But over recent years, state leaders have started
11:46to recognize that the downsides go beyond just
costs—it’s also just risky. You see, all mainland
11:53container cargo gets unloaded here, at the port
of Honolulu—with no exception. This is the only
12:00commercial port in the state that has the cranes
necessary to unload the kind of large, ocean-going
12:05cargo ships used by Matson and Pasha Hawaii. Those
on the other islands are only capable of accepting
12:11and unloading smaller barges. So there’s a single
facility capable of bringing large quantities of
12:17goods into the islands, and it’s on the coast.
That means the fear is two-fold—tsunamis and
12:23hurricanes. Either of these disasters could
render the cranes used to unload ships inoperable,
12:28and even if they didn’t, the ports are well within
the possible inundation zones for either meaning
12:33the surrounding infrastructure—like the roads
used to bring containers out and staff in—could
12:37be flooded and damaged for an extended period.
Having recognized this, the state did invest in
12:42a large portable crane capable of unloading
containers, and that’s stored at Pearl
12:46Harbor—the military base which is earmarked
to operate as an alternate port in the event
12:50of Honolulu becoming inoperable. But estimates
suggest this plan could only accommodate between
12:5415-20% of normal cargo inflows, and as the recent
incident at the port of Baltimore demonstrated,
13:00disruption to port operations can last months.
Of course, airports and roll-on-roll-off ships
13:06could provide a backstop for necessities
in the event of a major natural disaster,
13:10but the concentration of infrastructure in the
port of Honolulu means that if it gets damaged
13:14or disrupted, it could take quite a while
for life in Hawaii to get back to normal.
13:19But it doesn’t have to be this way—in fact, it
wasn’t. Some 100 miles or 160 kilometers and three
13:27islands over from Pearl Harbor, along Maui’s dry
west coast, just north of the sunny Keaka Beach,
13:33and bumping up against the manicured landscape
surrounding the undeniably aging Maui Paradise
13:37Oceanfront Condo is what visitors describe as a
pleasant wading pool, or a shallow lagoon within
13:43which one can see small fish and turtles up close.
But what these reviewers missed was the fact that
13:49this is not just a convenience for tourists but a
historical artifact—a physical explanation for how
13:55ancient Hawaii fed itself for centuries before
European contact and centuries upon centuries
14:00before the advent of modern container ships.
This is a coastal fish pond—one of about 360
14:07that dotted the Hawaiian islands at the time
of James Cook’s arrival in 1778, and one of
14:11the last vestiges of an intricate aquaculture
structure that stretched from sea to mountain-top.
14:18Now there’s two major natural particularities
that broadly define the Hawaiian islands. First,
14:24as a rugged volcanic outcropping, the islands
are generally mountainous, with high points on
14:28the larger islands ranging from a few thousand
feet above sea level, to well over 10,000 feet
14:33above sea level. Second, they don’t receive
precipitation evenly—the high country and the
14:38north and east sides receive feet upon feet of
rain annually, while the dry south western sides
14:43measure their precipitation in inches. Faced with
rugged uplands and flatter but drier lowlands,
14:49Hawaiian agriculture took shape around holistic
watersheds—letting gravity do most of the work.
14:55Following streams gushing out from the
higher elevation forests, Hawaiians would
14:58strategically dam or divert sections to flood
fields for non-native taro, a carbohydrate-rich
15:04dietary staple. The growing taro, in turn, would
provide food and shelter for fish such as mullet
15:09and silver perch—providing yet more food and
nutrients. Water released from these catchments
15:15would then flow into lower freshwater ponds where
freshwater prawn and sea-migrating fish would
15:20spawn. In turn, these nutrient-rich waters would
then fill brackish ponds, then seawater ponds,
15:26connected by canals and separated by gates
from the larger ocean that would let smaller
15:30fish in without letting bigger fish escape. With
comparatively minimal alteration of the landscape,
15:35and with only the strength of a human workforce,
Hawaiians, through aquaculture supplemented with
15:40animal husbandry and traditional agriculture,
achieved sustainable food sovereignty.
15:46Of course it goes without saying that such a
system was in part made possible by a markedly
15:50different property ownership regime, a subsistence
lifestyle rather than an extractive one,
15:54and a feudal organization of labor that’s long
been left behind. But it also showed that without
15:59much in the way of technology, and with the
strategic use of non-native crops, Hawaii could
16:04sustainably produce food for a population that’s
been estimated to have touched 700 to 900,000
16:10inhabitants at the time of Western contact.
There are only remnants of this aquaculture
16:15system left today. The arrival of Europeans and
western diseases decimated native populations,
16:21while western interpretations of land use and
property rights culminated in the 1848 Great
16:26Māhele, a legal transition of land ownership
from a feudal regime into private property.
16:32Not far from Kihei, in the city of Lahaina,
once a residence of King Kamehameha III,
16:37now a city rebuilding after unprecedented
but entirely explainable wildfires, and one
16:42of these historically central ponds sat under an
unspectacular park and some tennis courts. And not
16:47so far down the road, standing 225 feet in the
air, is another artifact that largely informed
16:53the pond’s destruction. While the Jones Act may
explain why food is so expensive to import, it’s
16:58sugarcane and pineapples that begins to explain
why Hawaii has to import food in the first place.
17:05For a concentrated few, the proliferation of
steam-powered ships, the advent of the California
17:09Gold Rush then the American Civil War, and the
newly established ability to purchase Hawaiian
17:13land in the mid-1800s proved a bonafide bonanza.
With cheap land, cheap labor, minimal oversight,
17:20and maximum exploitation, the rich arable Hawaiian
lowlands turned from food-producers, to cash crop
17:26producers as the only agriculture diversity
stemmed from what was being monocropped—sugar
17:31cane or pineapples. Peaking in the 1950s, the
plantation era dominated Hawaiian agriculture
17:37for more than a century. Effectively turning a
self sustaining, sovereign food system into a cash
17:44crop exporter. But with statehood came increased
regulation and labor rights. And with the jet age
17:49came increased accessibility—suddenly Hawaii
wasn’t some vague American holding impossibly
17:54far away, but now a tropical destination that
didn’t require a passport. With stricter labor
18:00laws and higher wages, increased competition for
real estate, and increasing competition abroad,
18:05monocropping slowly ceded economic centrality
to tourism. With a growing population,
18:10and an increasing visitor count, Hawaii now
needed more food than ever, and yet after a
18:15century of relentless exporting, could produce
less than ever. While some small Hawaiian farms
18:20began to infill shuddering plantation lands, the
cheapest, fastest way to keep the islands fed was
18:26importing. With beef imports, fruit imports, and
vegetable imports all doubling from 1960 to 2000,
18:32the islands went from producing somewhere around
half of their own food, to less than a tenth.
18:37This rather new system has started to have some
real consequences—the Hawaiian cost of living
18:42crisis is severe—it is the most expensive state to
live in, by a wide margin. And food prices are far
18:50from all of it—the housing market is perhaps
the biggest contributor to the state’s woes,
18:55with an $840,000 median home price which, of
course, is also the highest in the nation.
19:00Estimates suggest that 44% of households in the
state do not earn enough to pay for the absolute
19:06bare-bones of necessities. After all, much of
the work available is low-wage service-sector
19:11jobs relating to the tourism industry. So in
consequence, Native Hawaiians—the descendants
19:16of those who’ve inhabited the islands for a
millenia—are packing up and leaving the state
19:21en masse. In fact, for the first time, the 2020
Census indicated that the majority of Hawaiians
19:27now live not in Hawaii, but on the mainland.
But at least, finally, there appears to be some
19:33recognition that the way Hawaii feeds itself
is broken. Over recent years, the government
19:38in Honolulu has started to put a concerted effort
into returning things to the way they were—or at
19:43least moving in that direction. And the timing is
right. Dole’s Oahu plantation stopped production
19:48in the 90s, and since has transformed into
a tourist destination. Del Monte, another
19:53agriculture giant, finished its operations in the
state in 2008, while Hawaii’s last sugar mill,
19:59that of Maui, closed in 2016. So that
means there are huge swaths of former
20:04plantation land now empty and available,
and the state’s trying to put it to use.
20:09Maui’s former sugar plantation, for example,
was purchase in 2018 by a company called Maui
20:14Pono which has converted the fields into
production of lemons, oranges, avocados,
20:18bananas, onions, and more—a diversified
array of crops grown not for export, but
20:23rather to be inserted directly into the Hawaiian
supply chain, hitting store shelves at Walmart,
20:27Costco, Safeway, and other retailers that
otherwise would import from the mainland.
20:31And this fits into a concerted cross-government
effort to convert plantation land state-wide.
20:36But it’s really too early to tell whether this is
yielding results—there’s just not enough data yet,
20:41and local food production also isn’t, in and
of itself, a direct solution to the issues
20:46presented by the state’s current situation.
The cost of labor is still extremely high,
20:51so in many cases the cost of locally-grown goods
might be at-par with outside products—the decrease
20:57in transportation costs is counterbalanced with
the increase in production costs. But it’s a
21:02start—incremental progress towards reversing
a century of reliance on the mainland.
It’s
21:08really quite rare for a country to hold land
so far from its core—there are some instances,
21:13but most countries’ land is contiguous. It’s
rarer still for that land to be organized not
21:19as a territory—existing as some separated class
and enjoying some higher level of autonomy—but
21:24rather as a fully integrated component of the
country itself—in this case, a state. But even
21:29among those—Réunion, the Canary Islands, and
perhaps a few others—it is even rarer, perhaps
21:35unprecedented for land so far from the country’s
core to be so deeply integrated—politically,
21:41economically, and socially—with the rest of it.
It is therefore reasonable to conclude that this
21:46isn’t natural—it’s a uniquely American thing
to attempt to interlink itself with a series
21:50of islands so far away. In some ways this has
worked—just look at the strip malls and fast food
21:57chains and big box retailers. But in actuality,
Hawaii was not truly interlinked with the US—it
22:03was conquered. There was equilibrium, Hawaii was a
self-sustaining society, until America came in and
22:11broke that tenuous balance. Decades upon decades
of economic forces have compounded the effects,
22:17and today the state’s in an unsustainable
state—food, housing, everything just costs too
22:23much compared to the wages earned in the state.
There’s not yet some grand solution—even increased
22:28local food production will take ages to induce
meaningful change—but at the very least the state
22:33now recognizes the problem. The Hawaiian Kingdom
may never return, but Hawaiian self-reliance can.
22:42As far as American states go, Hawaii is just about
one of the most difficult to research and write
22:46a fair and accurate script about. With a long,
proud history as an empire itself, and an even
22:51longer history as independent culture and society
that still persists to this very day, navigating
22:56and understanding current trends and news events
like the Lahaina wildfires without recognizing,
23:00and thus replicating, biases on how the rest
of the US understands and often oversimplifies
23:05Hawaiian current events proved time consuming. It
only makes sense, though, that news outlets that
23:10rely on clicks to turn advertising revenue present
tragedies like the Lahaina fire in incendiary and
23:15highly partisan ways. But there is a way to
cut through the slant and the noise—that’s
23:20Ground News, the sponsor for this video. By
looking into the Lahaina fire with the help of
23:24Ground News it becomes clear that the centrist
and left-leaning outlets have spent more time
23:28covering the tragedy, the state’s response to the
tragedy, and the underlying routes of the tragedy,
23:32while the right has been practically silent on
the topic. With such an imbalance in coverage
23:37between left and right, Ground News identifies
the topic as a “blind spot,” which is one of my
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