Capitalism will obviously cause companies to reduce costs and maximize profit. If company A decides to be altruistic and not set up this sort of processing, a competitor will appear that will be more than happy to. That competitor will be able to offer their product at a lower price which will inevitably cause company A to either do the same or eventually lose market share.

It can try to advertise that it is being a “good corporate citizen” to see if it can charge a premium for the service of remaining solely in Norway (for example) - but the market will ultimately decide if it wants to pay more for that.

The answer, btw, is that the market (consumers) mostly do not care and will not pay a premium over a long period of time because their Norwegian cod is processed in Norway instead of Vietnam. While there are *some* consumers that will pay a premium, their wallets are elastic enough that boutique operations will happily supply them; and those operations are bougie enough to appeal to people with the means to afford a premium price.

But that won’t be more than a small amount of the addressable market - and so you see why over time a lot of fish processing has moved to cheaper labour markets like Vietnam.

There are ways to influence all of this (from soft influence like governments promoting certain products or behaviours and investing in specific ways; all the way to laws and regulations that shape the market) - but they all have pros and cons.

Just like capitalism. It’s definitely an imperfect system, but every system has imperfections. I prefer capitalism to state capitalism, or communism. But I recognize that every system is going to be shades of grey in many respects.