It comes back to this whole discussion about the cost of food in terms of what goes on. In this country the percentage of our disposable income that we spend on food is way lower than pretty much everywhere else in the world, particularly relative to Europe. Food is relatively inexpensive in this country, and the margin squeeze from that concentration of retail in food service comes down to the processors, so their margins are squeezed.
How you see that manifested is that the Americans are investing at the rate of about 2.5% capital over their depreciation. We're at about 0.8%. What that tells you is that we're trying to cover some of our bottom line out of the depreciation. We're not investing even what we're taking as depreciation currently. That has been going on for a number of years, and it has negatively impacted modernization and automation.
The Netherlands has gone in the entirely opposite direction. The Netherlands, after World War II, said they were never going to starve again. They invested in this industry. They are automated. The trade attaché from Washington told me they've invested $54,000 of capital for every hour of labour they use in their food processing industry. They have higher wage and benefit rates than the Americans do, yet they beat the Americans at their own game because they have very highly automated and very sophisticated processing facilities. That's really where we need to be in this country.
We've got this huge agricultural base. We've got all this wonderful agricultural output that we could transform. We've got a huge percentage of the world's fresh water and we haven't been able to figure out how to capitalize. What we have to do is take this industry, modernize it, and get it automated. We'll still have lots of jobs for people, because we've got areas that are going begging right today. If this country had a policy that it wanted to be back to number three or preferably number two in terms of food nations in this world, the only thing stopping us is really the will to get on with it and get it done.