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　　Industrial Agriculture Must Give Way to Sustainable Farming

　　From Agribusiness Examiner 297 10/29/03

　　By Al Krebs

　　THAYNE COZART: The proclaimed economic and societal benefits of a worldwide industrial agriculture system wouldnt measure up very well when compared to a sustainable agriculture system if an evaluation of the industrial system honestly measured all of its external costs against its claimed benefits.

　　That was the primary point driven home by Jules Pretty, professor and　director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of　Essex in England, during a seminar to students and faculty who packed a　classroom at Iowa State University October 20.

　　The topic of Prettys seminar was Rethinking Agri-Culture as if the Real　World Matters. The seminar was sponsored by the Energy Initiative of ISUs Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and the ISU bioethics program.

　　Pretty, who also is editor of the Journal of Sustainability, contended that　those who support industrialized agriculture measure its success in narrow　economic terms of food price and availability and tend to ignore its costly　unintended consequences to society and the environment.

　　He added, They are not being seriously challenged to give a full　accounting. We are trying at the Centre to change that by scientifically　measuring or estimating in Britain what we call the externalities of

　　industrialized agriculture and also the full benefits of a sustainable ag　system.

　　In the British study, some of those industrial ag externalities evaluated　were: water pollution from farm waste, soil nutrients, erosion, and

　　pesticides; loss of landscape and biodiversity; food-borne diseases; air　pollution from gaseous emissions; unnecessary transportation costs of food;human dislocation from rural to urban; rural community decline; poor human diets and obesity, and cost of direct government subsidies.

　　In his study, the annual costs of these externalities during the 1990s　totaled 1.54 billion pounds . Britain had　to spend this to deal with the effects of industrial ag, so this cost is a　hidden subsidy from the public to polluters, Pretty emphasized.

　　Some of the sustainable ag benefit he tried to evaluate were: landscape　aesthetics, biodiversity, clean water, flood protection, carbon　sequestration, rural economy, and community cohesion.

　　The largest value ascribed to a positive benefits from sustainable ag　practices was 14 billion pounds for rural landscape　services . In Britain, the annual value for rural tourism　　outstripped the total value of all the food produced nearly 10-fold.