THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY JULES PRETTY

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART III

 

PART I: AGRARIAN AND RURAL PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 6: Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson

Chapter 7: Creating Social Capital by Cornelia Butler Flora and jan L. Flora

 

PART 2: AGROECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

Introduction to Part 2: Agroecological Perspectives

Part 2 of this Reader in Sustainable Agriculture draws together five agroecological perspectives by Jules Pretty, Erin Tegtmeier and Michael Duffy, Steve Sherwood and colleagues, Stephen Gliessman and Gordon Conway.

In the first article, an excerpt from the 2002 book, Agri-Culture, Jules Pretty indicates that the real costs of food are much higher than the price paid in the shop. Environmental externalities and the diversion of tax revenues to subsidize agriculture contribute to the real cost. Agriculture, like any economic sector, has both negative and positive side-effects, and it is the movement towards a more multifunctional view of agriculture that could result in a better understanding of what contributes to agricultural sustainability. This paper summarizes the first study of the full costs of a modern agricultural sector. In the UK, these amounted to some UK£1.5 billion per year during the 1990s. These external costs are alarming – and should call into question what we mean by efficiency. Increased sustainability in agricultural systems can only happen if these external costs are substantially reduced.

In the second paper, recently published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, Erin Tegtmeier and Michael Duffy analyse the full cost of modern agricultural production in the US. These are of the order of US$5.6 to 16.9 billion per year (in 2002 $), arising from damage to water resources, soils, air, wildlife and biodiversity, and harm to human health. Additional annual costs of $3.7 billion arise from agency costs associated with programmes to address these problems or encourage a transition towards more sustainable systems. Following various partial studies published in the 1990s, this was the first study of the costs of the whole of the agricultural sector in the US. As the authors indicate, ‘many in the US pride themselves on our cheap food. But this study demonstrates that consumers pay for food well beyond the grocery store.’

The third article by Steve Sherwood and co-authors is a chapter drawn from the 2004 book, The Pesticide Detox. It focuses on pesticide use and its effects in the highland region of Carchi in the northern Andes. Farmers use a wide range of pesticides, both hazardous and benign, and although local and international businesses indicate that highly toxic products can be used safely, the evidence from the ground is different. This study found that poisonings in Carchi are amongst the highest recorded in the world – an annual rate of 171 per 100,000 population for morbidity, and 21 per 100,000 for mortalities. Pesticides were found on family clothing, on food, and in children’s bedding. To illustrate these pathways to local people, the researchers added fluorescent dyes to pesticides, and then used UV lights to show their presence. The challenge, now, is to develop new ways of learning about pests and diseases in such rural communities, as well as develop agricultural practices that reduce dependency on those pesticides that are harmful to humans and the environment.

The fourth article by Stephen Gliessman is an overview of agroecological approaches to the management of agricultural systems. As he indicates, ‘discussions about sustainable agriculture must go beyond what happens within the fences of any individual farm.’ It is the wider environmental, economic and social interactions that are critical. A practicing farmer as well as a distinguished academic, Gliessman draws on a wide range of experience to set out an agroecological perspective to the flows of energy and nutrients in agroecosystems, and identifies the population regulating mechanism and potential for developing dynamic equilibria. The paper includes a table (11.1) that summarizes the guiding principles for a process of design of and conversion to sustainable agricultural systems. Comparisons are made between traditional, conventional (or modern) and sustainable systems. This question of redesign is critical if we are to emerge different patterns of agricultural and environmental management that are able to produce both food and important environmental services.

In the final paper of this section of the Reader, drawn from his book The Doubly Green Revolution, Gordon Conway summarizes the ecological principles for controlling pests, and describes the history of integrated pest management approaches. Since the middle of the 20^th century, the main approach to pest, pathogen and weed problems has been to spray with insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. But these are frequently costly and inefficient, let alone potentially harmful to human health and wildlife. Conway describes the successful control of cocoa pests in north Borneo following detailed examination of local ecology, which found that the elimination of some spraying allowed parasites to re-establish and control the target pests. The paper goes on to describe the growth in understanding of rice field agroecology, and how pest outbreaks seemed to be linked  to pesticide use. Alternative approaches to pest management were radical in their emphasis on understanding and managing biological diversity in and around rice fields. Ultimately, this needs the full engagement and participation of farmers in the process of systems analysis and transformation.

Perspective 8: Reality Cheques by Jules Pretty

About the author

Jules Pretty is head of the Department of Biological Sciences and professor of environment and society at the University of Essex. He is deputy chair of the UK government’s Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), and has served on government advisory committees for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Cabinet Office and the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI). He received a 1997 award from the Indian Ecological Society for ‘International Contributions to Sustainable and Ecological Agriculture’, and was runner up for the 2002 European Sicco Mansholt Prize for agricultural science.

The real costs of food

When we buy or bake our daily bread, do we ever wonder about hw much it really costs? We like it when our food is cheap, and complain when prices rise. Indeed, riots over food prices date back at least to Roman times. Government have long since intervened to keep food cheap in the shops, and tell us that policies designed to do exactly this are succeeding. In most industrialized countries, the proportion of the average household budget spent on food has been declining in recent years. Food is getting cheaper relative to other good, and many believe that this must benefit everyone as we all need to eat food. But we have come to believe a damaging myth. Food is not cheap. It only appears cheap in the shop because we are not encouraged to think of the hidden costs of damage caused to the environment and human health by certain systems of agricultural production. Thus we actually pay three times for our food. Once at the till in the shop, a second time through taxes that are used to subsidise farmers or support agricultural development; and a third time to clean up the environmental and health side effects. Food looks cheap because we cunt these costs elsewhere in society. As economists put it, the real costs are not internalised in prices.

This is not to say that prices in the shop should rise, as this would penalize the poor over the wealthy. Using taxes to raise money to support agricultural development is also potentially progressive, as the rich pay proportionately more in taxes, and the poor, who spend proportionately more of their budget on food, benefit if prices stay low. But this idea of fairness falters whenset against the massive distrortions brought about by modern agricultural systems that additionally impose large environmental and health costs throughout economies. Other people and institutions pay these costs, and this is both unfair and inefficient. If we were able to add up the real costs of producing food, we would find that modern industrialized systems of production perform poorly in comparison with sustainable systems. This is because we permit cost-shifting – the costs of ill-health, lost biodiversity and water pollution are transferred away from farmers, and so not paid by those producing the food nor included in the price of the products sold. Until recently, though, we have lacked the methods to put a price on these side-effects.

When we conceive of agriculture as more than simply a food factory, indeed as a multifunctional activity with many side-effects, then this idea that farmers do only one thing must change.

• It is modern agriculture that has brought a narrow view of farming, and it has led us to crisis. 
• The rural environment in industrialized countries suffers, the food we eat is as likely to do as much harm as good, and we still think food is cheap.
• To farm properly you have got to maintain soil fertility; to maintain soil fertility you need a mixed farming system.
• It is not only sound business practice but plain common sense to take steps to maintain the health and fertility of the soil.
• Sir George Stapleton argued in 1941 that ‘senseless systems of monoculture designed to produce food and other crops at the cheapest possible cost have rendered waste literally millions of acres of once fertile or potentially fertile country.’

 

Agriculture’s unique multifunctionality

We should all now be asking what is farming for? Clearly, in the first instance, to produce food, and we have become very good at it. A great success, but only if our measures of efficiency are narrow. Agriculture is unique as an economic sector. It does more than just produce food, fibre, oil and timber. It has a profound impact on many aspects of local, national and global economies and ecosystems. These impacts can be either positive or negative. The negative ones are worrying. Pesticides and nutrients leaching from farms have to be removed from drinking water, and these costs are paid by water consumers, not by the polluters. The polluters, therefore, benefit by not paying to clean up the mess they created, and have no incentive to change behaviour. What also makes agriculture unique is that it affects the very assets on which it relies for success. Agricultural systems at all levels rely for their success on the value of services flowing from the total stock of assets that they control, and five types of asset, natural, social, human, physical and financial capital, and now recognized as being important.

• As agricultural systems shape the very assets on which they rely for inputs, a vital feedback loop occurs from outcomes to inputs.
• It is farming that makes people healthier, farming that promotes a more just society, and farming that preserves the earth and its networks of life. Good farming protects the land, even when it uses it.
• Sustainable agricultural systems tend to have a positive effect on natural, social and human capital, whilst unsustainable ones feed back to deplete these assets, leaving less for future generations.

Agriculture is, therefore, fundamentally multifunctional. It jointly produces many unique non-food functions that cannot be produced by other economic sectors so efficiently. Clearly a key policy challenge, both for industrialized and developing countries, is to find ways to maintain and enhance food production. But the key question is: can this be done whilst seeking both to improve the positive side-effects and to eliminate the negative ones? It will not be easy, as past agricultural development has tended to ignore both the multifunctionality of agriculture and the pervasive external costs.

This leads us to a simple and clear definition for sustainable agriculture. It is farming that makes the best use of nature’s goods and services whilst not damaging the environment. It does this by integrating natural process such as nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration and natural enemies of pests into food production processes. It also minimizes the use of non-renewable inputs that damage the environment or harm the health of farmers and consumers. It makes better use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, so improving their self-reliance, and it makes productive use of people’s capacities to work together to solve common management problems. Through this, sustainable agriculture also contributes to a range of public goods, such as clean water, wildlife, carbon sequestration in soils, flood protection and landscape quality.

 

Putting monetary values on externalities

• At the University of Essex, we recently developed a new framework to study the negative externalities of UK agriculture. We conservatively estimated that the external costs of UK agriculture, almost all of which is modernized and industrialized, to be at last £1.5 to £2 billion each year.
• Another study by Olivia Hartridge and David Pearce has also put the annual costs of modern agriculture in excess of £1 billion. These costs are imposed on the rest of society, and effectively a hidden subsidy to the polluters.
• The annual costs arise from damage to the atmosphere (£316 million), to water (£231 million), to biodiversity and landscapes (£126 million), to soils (£96 million) and to human health (£777 million).
• Using a similar framework of analysis, the external costs in the US amount to nearly £13 billion per year.

 

How do all these costs arise? Pesticides, nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients, soil, farm wastes and micro-organisms escape from farms to pollute ground and surface water. Costs are incurred by water delivery companies, and then passed onto their customers, to remove these contaminants, to pay for restoring water courses following pollution incidents and eutrophication, and to remove soil from water. Using UK water companies’ returns for both capital and operating expenditure, we estimated annual external costs to be £125 million for removal of pesticides below legal standards, £16 million for nitrate, £69 million for soil and £23 million for Cryptosporidium. These costs would be much greater if the policy goal were complete removal of all contamination.

Agriculture also contributes to atmospheric pollution through the emissions of four gases: methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, ammonia from livestock waste and some fertilizers, and carbon dioxide from energy and fossil fuel consumption and loss of soil carbon. These in turn contribute to atmospheric warming (methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide), ozone loss in the stratosphere (nitrous oxide), acidification of soils and water (ammonia) and eutrophication (ammonia). The annual cost for these gases is some £310 million. A healthy soil is vital for agriculture, but modern farming has accelerated erosion, primarily through the cultivation of winter cereals, the conversion of pasture to arable, the removal of field boundaries and hedgerows, and overstocking of livestock on grasslands. Offsite costs arise when soil carried off farms by water or wind blocks ditches and roads, damages property, induces traffic accidents, increases the risk of floods, and pollutes water through sediments and associated nitrate, phosphate and pesticides. These amount to £14 million per year. Carbon in organic matter in soils is also rapidly lost when pastures are ploughed or when agricultural land is intensively cultivated, and adds another £82 million to the annual external costs.

• Modern farming has had  severe impact on wildlife in the UK.
• Pesticides can effect workers engaged in their manufacture, transport and disposal, operators who apply them in the field, and the general public.

These external costs of UK agriculture are alarming. They should call into question what we mean by efficiency. Farming receives £13 billion of public subsidies each year, yet causes another £1.5 billion of costs elsewhere in the economy. If we had no alternatives, then we would have to accept these costs. But in every case, there are choices. Pesticides do not have to get into water. Indeed, they do not need to be used at all in many farm systems. The pesticide market in the UK is £500 million, yet we pay £120 million just to clean them out of drinking water. We do not need farming that damages biodiversity and landscapes; we do not need intensive livestock production that encourages infections and overuse of antibiotics. Not all costs, though, are subject to immediate elimination with sustainable methods of production. Cows will still belch methane, until animal feed scientists find a way of amending ruminant biochemistry to prevent its emission. But it is clear that many of these massive distortions could be removed with some clear thinking, firm policy action, and brave action by farmers.