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Excerpt from Vegetable Situation: May, 1971 The vegetable industry has responded to the shift to convenience foods by increasing the tonnage of vegetables used for processing from million tons (1957-59 average) to million tons (1967-69 average). Cucumber imports were almost negligible in the 1950's but had risen to more than million hundredweight by 1970. More than million hundredweight of onions and peppers from Mexico entered the United States in 1970. Competition to the American vegetable industry from abroad in coming years will continue to be closely related to domestic labor costs and other labor problems. The replacement of men by machines, where feasible, as has been accomplished in much of the processing vegetable industry, will tend to ease some of the pressure on domestic producers. But in the absence of restrictions, imports are likely to increase further, because labor and other costs in the domestic vegetable industry are likely to rise fairly rapidly. In the processed vegetable sector, significant competition from imports has been limited largely to tomato products from Mediterranean countries, and canned mushrooms from Taiwan. Exports of fresh vegetables, mostly to Canada, have taken about 3 percent of domestic production in recent years - a figure not likely to change greatly in the l97o's. Most of this increase has come in the Pacific Coast States, and a little more than half the processed vegetable production now originates in the West. Some additional tomato, sweet corn, and pickle tonnage has come from the North Central area but not enough to maintain this region's share of total output. In contrast to fresh market vegetables, Southern regions contribute only a small share of total processing crops. The declining share of the North Atlantic States is attributed largely to interregional competition with the West where yields are higher and per ton production costs are lower for many important crops. About the Publisher For