Hawaii set the standards for commercial pineapple, but that does not assure the islands’ standing in the world’s marketplace. As with any other industrial producer, Hawaii’s pineapple industry needed to be competitive. Both in pineapple and sugar, Hawaii’s agronomists developed farming techniques and hybrid strains that improved productivity to keep ahead of operations with lower farming costs in competing countries. But farming techniques and hybrid cultivars are transferrable; the better the Hawaii agricultural industry got in using technology to improve yields, the better the world got. What Hawaii could not transfer to regions competing with the isle-grown product were its agricultural wage scales and benefits. Advocates for global free trade routinely downplay if not ignore differences in employee costs and the reasons for them. Global-trade advocates declare that if a producer is more efficient, production should be shifted to that producer, wherever it may be.