If voters have any doubts about the state and federal governments’ propensity for unintended consequences, all they need to do is look for U.S.-grown asparagus at the grocery store.

They might not find it. They will find asparagus from Mexico and Peru but only a handful of bunches from Washington state.

“…We have just a green flood of cheap, imported asparagus,” said Alan Schreiber, executive director of the Washington Asparagus Commission.

It wasn’t always that way. Asparagus once was a robust crop in Washington state. In 1990, 30,000 acres of asparagus were grown there. Now, there are 3,000 acres.

Growers fear the crop could disappear entirely within the next decade.

“I am seeing long-term, generational asparagus farmers leave the industry,” said Travis Meacham, Washington Asparagus Commission chairman and manager of Friehe Farms near Moses Lake, Wash.

“These are guys that, their fathers grew it, and they are completely getting out of it. When we’re seeing people that have grown for 30, 40, 50 years that are getting out of it, that really scares me,” Meacham told Capital Press reporter Matthew Weaver.

What happened?

The state and federal governments created a perfect storm of good intentions that opened the floodgates to foreign competitors and drove up farmers’ labor costs.

The first body blow was the Andean Trade Preference Act, which Congress passed in 1991. The idea was to entice farmers in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru to stop growing coca and other plants that went into the production of cocaine and other drugs.

The law did that by providing duty-free access to the U.S. market for legitimate crops such as asparagus and other products.

Congress renewed and expanded the ATP Act in 2002 by passing the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, which provides even wider duty-free access to the U.S. market for 5,600 crops and products.

As a result, more than $1.2 billion in foreign crops and products have flooded the U.S. marketplace each year, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.

While the increase in duty-free exports to the U.S. is undeniable, the underground drug trade continues.

“Peru is the second largest producer of cocaine and cultivator of coca in the world, with an estimated (123,000 acres) of coca under cultivation in 2017,” the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs reported.

Apparently, Peruvian farmers only diversified their crops.

In the meantime, Washington state farmers have seen the U.S. market flooded by duty-free asparagus from Peru.

Then the Washington Legislature imposed a double-whammy of mandatory overtime pay and higher minimum wages on the state’s farmers.

Asparagus must be hand-harvested, because the plants grow at different rates. This makes labor more than 60% of the cost of production.

Here’s the killer for Washington farmers. In Mexico and Peru, asparagus workers are paid $10 to $20 a day.

In Washington state, they are paid more than $20 an hour — plus overtime.

As a result, “We have the highest ag labor costs in the Western Hemisphere,” said Schreiber, of the asparagus commission.

Members of Congress and the Washington Legislature surely didn’t intend to kill the asparagus industry in Washington state.

But they’re working on it. By opening the floodgates to duty-free imports and then raising the cost of labor, they may yet accomplish it.

Even the best of intentions can’t offset unintended consequences.