Jason of Gristmill makes a valiant effort at determining what exactly needs to be done to “fix” the environmental issues that agriculture — as practiced now — presents. His ideas:
1. Remove all agricultural subsidies, tariffs, and quotas across the globe (this, by the way, is one of the stated goals of the WTO);
2. remove all associated subsidies, such as subsidies for water (especially) and energy;
3. heavily regulate and/or restrict agriculture in especially sensitive ecological areas, i.e., near rivers, on marginal land, etc.; and
4. impose carbon taxes on fuel use and taxes on the most toxic pesticides that reflect the damage they cause.
On the one hand, I’m like — Yey! Just 4 simple rules!
On the other hand, I’m like — Tee hee! Ha ha ha ha ha! Good luck with getting any of those ideas implemented! :P
And of course, Jason knows these things’re tough to achieve — He writes: “Although what I have laid out is the ideal circumstance, any steps in this direction should be warmly embraced and advocated.”
Your thoughts?
Question for you concerning Jason’s #3 suggestion where he advocates “heavily regulate and/or restrict agriculture in especially sensitive ecological areas, i.e., near rivers, on marginal land, etc.; and…”
Isn’t this approach a bit Orwellian and unbalanced? If this were implemented any regulation that addressed this could be used to control all arable acres in the U.S. as every acre is part of a drainage basin. You would find that the overbearing regulation would stifle food output to the point where we would have severe and sustained food shortages.
A better alternative would be to find better ways to manage weeds and pests than to eliminate all control options. This would be a long term effort, however, it would not disrupt food production and would not create man-made food shortages.
Back to the issue, however; Much of the damage caused by the environment can be traced back to urban areas and heavily populated cities on the east and west coasts, not to mention New Orleans on the south coast. Urban dwellers generate the lion’s share of CO2 in exhaust emissions, pollute the groundwater and waterways by heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides on their quarter acre lawns (on a sq.ft. basis, much higher than farmers do by far).
If Jason believes in heavy Federal regulation to address environmental issues, would he then also agree to regulate the high population centers to the extent they are responsible for their contribution?
I suggest you add proposal #5 to Jason’s list; heavily regulate population centers to A) restrict population densities at all times to 1,000 people per sq. mile, or less, B) ban all vehicle use within the urban areas, C) eliminate all uses of coal fired, electric generating plants, D) ban all uses of organo-phosphates and chemicals in laundry degergents, soaps, shampoos, etc., E) eliminate all use of fertilizers and pesticides within the urban centers.
If #5 were included,only then would this Orwellian approach be effective in lessening the damage to the environment and place the responsibility where it is appropriate.
Comment by smokey — August 27, 2006 @ 3:18 pm
You would find that the overbearing regulation would stifle food output to the point where we would have severe and sustained food shortages.
Exactly.
I have to wonder how many people who say such things actually live in the countyside and know what they are talking about.
I live in the the Irish Countryside and now with the economy booming many people are moving out to the countryside for the country life. They are the types of people who go on about how great the likes of organic food and green energy are. And then complain of the smell when the farmers spread slurry (cow poo) on the fields and when a wind farm is built near their homes they go on about the price of property.
As for the comment.
price of food accurately reflects its true environmental costs,
How about the price of food reflects the needs of the people. Are you seriously suggesting that poor people should be priced out of the food market to protect “Jason’s ideal” view of the countryside. That is by far the most sicking suggestion I have heard in a long time.
Comment by simon — August 28, 2006 @ 10:35 am
These are not particularly original ideas, insofar as they have been discussed for years and years. But, anyway, here is my take.
#1: The objective here is to remove production distortions and move global agriculture to a “free” market ideal. There are two problems here. Removal of subsidies would increase the global price of these commodities and, thus, countries who (in general) are net importers of them would lose. Aggregate net global welfare would increase, but this is incomplete. One has to account for how these gains and losses are distributed. If LDCs are net exporters here, welfare may actually fall. For example, I recently read a working paper by the World Bank on cotton subsidy reform that concluded that full liberalization worldwide of distortions in this market would actually reduce the welfare of developing countries.
#2: Again, this is an efficiency-biased argument. Removal of these subsidies would doubtless result in full-cost pricing and promote efficiency, but this is almost certainly regressive. Consumers would pay more for their food (especially, poor consumers). Welfare improvements from efficiency may be substantially reduced by making the system less progressive than otherwise. As with lots of things political, this turns on what set of people are forced through taxation to subsidize agriculture and what set of people receive the benefits through lower prices than otherwise.
#3: As with lots of environmental economics (not my specialty), it is very hard to trace the marginal cost of most pollutants, because 1)The ecosystem is extremely complex; 2)Pollutants may not behave “nicely” – that is they are nonlinear in their marginal costs. A more rewarding analysis excepts a lot of uncertainty in the data and seeks to enact quantitative restrictions, or outright bans, based on a very bounded information set. I would also echo the previous comments and suggest that this policy is far too vague for comfort – the entire landmass of the planet receives some level of precipitation and thus participates in some drainage basin.
#4: On my good days, I think a carbon tax is a viable solution to air pollution. On my bad ones, I think that this policy suffers from data paucity and the nonlinearity mentioned above. For example, in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore goes out of his way to assert that the effects of carbon emissions may be very nonlinear indeed.
Jason’s ideas are a good start, but, in addition to being a distant objective, they may in fact be simply wrong and result in lower human welfare.
Comment by Fletch — August 28, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
In truth, sustainability means making our agroecosystems more resilient, not necessarily more economically efficient. Local agriculture and local knowledge make a system more stable and robust, and therfore more sustainable. Chemical agriculture represents the subjugation of a biological system to the demands of a market economy.
Further attempts to tilt the balance in the market’s favor will exacerbate our current situation; as the system collapses because of enormous inefficienies in soil/water management, energy use, and waste management, reality will force us to focus on a system’s resilience, and market dogma will be abandoned.
Comment by Agroblogger — August 28, 2006 @ 9:56 pm
Well he forgot to add: Take half the money saved from eliminating corporate welfare and turn it into tax incentives for small, local, organic farming. use the other half to pay down the deficit.
Use a few percenty of the first half to fund research into robotic farming designed to make organic farming using renewable electric power more efficient than chemical, diesel fueled, labor intensive farming.
That way organic farmers with a few acres can do it themselves on their computer connected robot that fertilizes (organic), waters, weeds,plants, harvests, all the stuff you would need to break your back doing, or break someone eles back, for below minimum wage.
Why do people use herbicide? Too much time and effort it takes to do it manually. Same with fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides. Squash potato bugs manually? Yikes.
But a robot will vacuum them up and feed ‘em to your chickens, bwwaaaacckk (happy chicken music).
Now go tell some really rich garden loving people about this you LAers, maybe Laury David will fund this? You go LAgirl!
Comment by amazingdrx — August 29, 2006 @ 6:30 am
Again, the four points do not adequately address all the contributors of the problem. It only addresses agriculture’s contribution, and namely, corporate “big farmers.”
It’s as if all the rest of the people on this planet don’t exist and do not have an impact on the outcome. That’s not how it works.
Comment by smokey — August 29, 2006 @ 7:03 am
One more thing, with the earth’s population hovering around six billion, a complete “back to nature” approach to agriculture would require a major paradigm shift of people to ag industries and dedication of massive funds, both public and private, to build and maintain food output.
Think of it this way, the way we have it now, people in the cities have the luxury of debating the pros and cons of sustainable agriculture while pursuing their careers. They need not worry about spending every waking hour gathering enough to eat. The miracle of modern agriculture does it for them for less than 10 percent of their disposable income. Compare that with 50-75 percent cost of income in poor countries. Would you rather prefer to spend most of your wages on food instead? I don’t think so.
Comment by smokey — August 29, 2006 @ 7:17 am
Smokey get off that carbon monoxide high and sniff reality.
Comment by amazingdrx — August 29, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
That’s an intelligent reply, ya…
By the way, the increased CO2 levels actually encourage increased production, since plants take in CO2 and expell Oxygen. That’s a good thing, don’t you think?
Comment by smokey — August 29, 2006 @ 7:37 pm
I have a number of responses to the above comments:
First off, in the full post on Grist:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/8/24/16525/9585
I specifically address the possible regressive aspects of this possibility (which would probably not be very large anyway)- we could more than make up for this by lowering taxes to the poor from the money we would save on subsidies.
Next point- I disagree that virtually all of farm land is on sensitive area- that is way too broad of a definition- I am not an ecologist but what I am getting at is that there are some areas where the soil is very marginal, where there are high levels of biodiversity, or near very important water ways where some added regulation is necessary, if not a strict prohibition on farming. This is probably warranted in a few % points of current agricultural land. I DO NOT advocate dracoian forms of regulation for the majority of productive activity.
For those who don’t want the price of food to reflect its true environmental cost, this strikes me as bizarre- they only way to get actors to take environmental costs into account is for this to happen- like I said, there are plenty of ways to address distributional issues once efficiency is taken into account, which it needs to be. I could envision a compromise situation where the elimination of farm subsidies comes with some lower taxes and increased food stamps for the poor that can be used in farmers markets- something along these lines would a. dramatically decrease agricultural pollution, b. save money, c. help the poor, d. help smaller farmers, and e. make us healthier.
Final point: as to developing countries losing out if we stopped subsidizing agriculure, yes the food-importing countries would lose but they would also have a greater incentive to develop their own industries and there are much better ways of helping them than trashing the environment to grow cheap wheat to send half way across the world.
J.S.
Comment by J.S. — August 29, 2006 @ 7:39 pm