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.