Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/pretty205.htm
March / April 2001
Farming : Jules Pretty
THE REAL COSTS OF MODERN FARMING

The agribusiness way to harvest wheat. Photograph: Jeri Gleiter/Still
Pictures

Pollution of water, erosion of soil and loss of natural habitat,
caused by chemical agriculture,cost the Earth.

from Resurgence issue 205
More articles on ecology and environment
RECENT DECADES have seen the growing globalization of the world food
system. Annual trade flows in the 1990s amounted to some US$4,000
billion, of which the food and drink market was $250 billion. Between
60% and 90% of all wheat, maize and rice is now marketed by just six
transnational companies. By the late 1990s, the top ten agrochemical
companies accounted for 80% of world sales.

Changes in the food system have brought considerable cost to the
environment and human health. Such problems have been widely
documented over recent decades, but it is only recently that efforts
to put a monetary cost on them have begun to emerge. These costs are
telling us something fundamentally important about the real costs of
modern food and farming.

Many farmers depend upon public finance to survive. Each year, this
amounts to about £3 billion in the UK. It has taken fifty years of
subsidies for farming to get to this point. It's hardly surprising
that policies tend to support one particular method of farming - one
that relies upon modern technologies to produce food.

At the University of Essex, we recently completed the first national
study of the environmental and health impacts of modern farming. We
looked at what are called "externalities" - the costs imposed by an
activity that are borne by others. These costs are not part of the
prices paid by producers or consumers. And when such externalities
are not included in prices, they distort the market. They encourage
activities that are costly to society even if the private benefits to
farmers are substantial.

A heavy lorry that damages a bridge, or pollutes the atmosphere,
externalizes some of its costs - and others pay for them. Similarly,
a pesticide used to control a pest imposes costs on others if it
leaks away from fields to contaminate drinking water. The types of
externality encountered in the agricultural sector have four distinct
features: 1) their costs are often neglected; 2) they often occur
with a time lag; 3) they often damage groups whose interests are not
represented; and 4) the identity of the producer of the externality
is not always known.

OUR STUDY, published in the journal Agricultural Systems, sought to
put a cost on these externalities in the UK. Although we recognized
that there are some positive side-effects of conventional
agriculture, we concentrated on the negative ones - in particular the
environmental and health costs (see Table). Two types of damage cost
were estimated: 1) the treatment or prevention costs incurred to
clean up the environment and restore human health to comply with
legislation or to return these to an undamaged state and 2) the
administration costs incurred by public agencies for monitoring
environmental, food and health implications.

We conservatively estimate that the total costs are £2.34 billion for

1996 alone in the UK. Significant costs arise from contamination of
drinking water with pesticides (£120 million per year), nitrate
(£16m), Cryptosporidium (£23m) and phosphate and soil
(£55m), from
damage to wildlife, habitats, hedgerows and drystone walls (£124m),
from emissions of gases (£1,113m), from soil erosion and organic
carbon losses (£96m), from food poisoning (£169m), and from BSE
(£607m).

Water is an interesting case. 25 million kilograms of pesticides are
used each year in farming - and some of these get into water. It
costs water companies £120 million each year to remove pesticides -
not completely, but to a level stipulated in law as acceptable. Water
companies do not pay this cost - they pass it on to those who pay
water bills. This represents a hidden subsidy to those who pollute.

Some of the costs are straightforward to measure, others more
difficult. How do we know about the effects of the greenhouse gases
methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide produced by farming?
Economists have been able to put a £/tonne cost on these gases based
on agreed estimates about the effects of future climate change. We
have been very conservative, using lower estimates of costs. But
still the costs are great.

Table 1. The annual total external costs of UK agriculture, 1996


Cost Category

1
Pesticides in sources of drinking water
120
1b
Nitrate in sources of drinking water
16
1c
Phosphate and soil in sources of drinking water
55
1d
Zoonoses (esp. Cryptosporidium) in sources of drinking water
23
1e
Eutrophication and pollution incidents (fertilizers, animal wastes,
sheep dips)
6
1f
Monitoring and advice on pesticides and nutrients
11
2
Damage to Natural Capital: Air
280
2a
Emissions of methane

2b
Emissions of ammonia
48
2c
Emissions of nitrous oxide
738
2d
Emissions of carbon dioxide
47
3.
Damage to Natural Capital: Soil

3a
Off-site damage caused by erosion
14
3b
Organic matter and carbon dioxide losses from soils
82
4.
Damage to Natural Capital: Biodiversity and Landscape

4a
Biodiversity/wildlife losses (habitats and species)
25
4b
Hedgerows and drystone walls
99
4c
Bee colony losses
2
4d
Agricultural biodiversity
+
5.
Damage to Human Health: Pesticides

5a
Acute effects
1
5b
Chronic effects
+
6.
Damage to Human Health: Nitrate
0
7.
Damage to Human Health: Micro-organisms and Other Disease Agents

7a
Bacterial and viral outbreaks in food
169
7b
Antibiotic resistance
+
7c
bse and new variant cjd
607

TOTAL:
£2,343
Notes:
1. This table does not include private costs borne by farmers
themselves.
2. + = not yet able to calculate costs.

EACH OF THESE COSTS should provoke questions about how they could be
reduced or even removed. Take carbon for example. British soils have
on average diminished in organic matter content by about a half in
the past twenty years. Effectively, farmers have been converting the
capital of soil fertility into the income of yields. This cannot go
on forever. Worse is the conversion of the carbon in organic matter
to carbon dioxide. However, farmers who farm to increase organic
matter are creating a "positive externality". Every kilogram of
carbon locked up in soil organic matter is one less in the
atmosphere. Carbon sequestration may indeed become a key source of
money for farmers. A group of Iowan farmers have just been paid
several million dollars by Canadian utility companies to use their
soils as a carbon sink. And soils with organic matter are better for
farmers too.

There are still many gaps in the analysis. So, the true costs are
likely to be higher. Some costs are known to be substantial
underestimates (e.g. acute and chronic pesticide poisoning of humans;
monitoring costs; eutrophication of reservoirs; restoration of all
hedgerow losses). Other costs are limited to certain geographic areas
of the UK (water company returns are for England and Wales only).
Some costs cannot be calculated (e.g. dredging to maintain navigable
water; flood defences; marine eutrophication; poisoning of domestic
pets). In addition, treatment and prevention costs may be
underestimates of the true costs. Similarly, the true costs of
biodiversity loss are significantly underestimated. In this study we
have included neither the cost of research nor public subsidy for
farming, nor are the many environmental and social costs associated
with getting food from the farm gate to consumers' plates.

So we actually pay three times for our food - once, over the counter;
twice, through our taxes, which are used largely to support one type
of farming; and thrice, to clean up the mess caused by this method.

WHERE DOES THIS leave us in policy terms? Already, we are beginning
to think about the next round of Common Agricultural Policy reform in
2006. Is it conceivable that we could evolve sustainable agriculture
systems that maximize their production of positive externalities -
goods that the public enjoys and is willing to pay for - as well as
minimizing the environmental and health costs?

The answer is clearly yes. We know enough about sustainable methods
of farming to be confident. Now with these cost estimates, we can
begin to identify priorities. But we need cost-effective ways of
proceeding. Organic farming has substantially lower negative
externalities than conventional farming. We roughly estimate these to
be no more than a third - perhaps £60-£70 per hectare. Organic
farming also has higher positive externalities - the other side of
the equation.

Equally, local food systems are a way forward. Jack Kloppenberg
coined the term "foodshed". Foodsheds are defined as "self-reliant,
locally or regionally based food systems comprised of diversified
farms using sustainable practices to supply fresher, more nutritious
foodstuffs to small-scale processors and consumers to whom producers
are linked by the bonds of community as well as economy".

Foodsheds tend to do two things:

They shorten the chain from production to consumption - so
eliminating some of the negative transport externalities;
They favour the production of positive externalities over negative
ones, leading to the accumulation of renewable assets throughout the
food system.
There are several practical ways to help such foodsheds to emerge:

Enhance the direct links between producers and consumers - such as
through farm shops, farmers' markets, community-supported
agriculture, veg-box schemes and other forms of direct selling;
Support local food shops - developing the interdependence of small
retailers, producers and consumers creates a dense food web that
provides more employment, good quality food and wider social benefits;
Build community co-operatives as alternative structures for both
producers and consumers - including the Japanese community sanchoku
groups or Spanish co-operatives, such as the large Mondragon Co-
operativa or smaller La Verde Oliva (a network of worker co-
operatives and family-owned organic farms in Andalucia);
Enhance home and urban food production - there are 300,000 allotments
in the UK, covering some 12,000 hectares, yielding 215,000 tonnes of
fresh produce every year, contributing some £561 million in value to
household consumption.
THE SUBSTANTIAL EXTERNAL costs of the modern agricultural and food
system pose great challenges for policy makers, farmers, food
companies and scientists. A range of policy reforms could do much to
internalize some of these costs and benefits in prices. The challenge
is to develop more sustainable farm practices that produce enough
food as well as maximize the positive external benefits of
agriculture. Attention needs to be paid to the social and
institutional processes that encourage farmers to work and learn
together. Policy integration is vital. In recent years, there have
been an increasing number of policies seeking to link agriculture
with more environmentally-sensitive management. These need to be
strengthened.

In Europe, most stakeholders agree that the Common Agricultural
Policy (cap) should be further reformed by decoupling payments from
farm productivity. A policy that integrates support for farming
together with rural development and environment could create new
jobs, protect natural resources and support rural communities. Such
reforms need to be supplemented with policy on regionalized food
systems.

Jules Pretty teaches at the University of Essex in Colchester. He is
the author of The Living Land and a government adviser. He will teach
a course at Schumacher College (tel: 01803 865934) in November 2001.