| FOR RELEASE: 10-22-03 ECOLOGIST CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL NOTIONS ABOUT AGRICULTURE AMES, Iowa -- A British ecologist who has studied farming systems throughout the world challenged Iowans to judge agricultural success by more than just its productivity and cheap commodities.Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for the Environment and Society at the University of Essex, visited Iowa recently as a guest of the Ecology Initiative of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. During a seminar on the Iowa State University campus, Pretty said attitudes about the nature of agriculture have changed during the past 50 years of tremendous progress in productivity. “We have come to view farming landscapes as being primarily bread baskets, yet agriculture is more than about producing food,” he said. “We get many positive things from agriculture, including clean water, cohesive communities, rural employment, flood protection, aesthetically pleasing landscapes and biodiversity.” On the other hand, agriculture has side effects that carry costs, such as the cost to clean up pollution from pesticides, nutrients, and soil; loss of landscape value and biodiversity; flooding; and most recently, effects on human health. “Modern farming looks good because it measures its own success narrowly – by increases in productivity and falling commodity prices that allow for cheap food,” he said. “But modern farming tends to ignore its own multi-functional nature and subsequently many of its other costs and benefits.” For example, Pretty notes that the western world puts emphasizes “cheap food” when “food is actually very expensive. We end up paying for it three times – once at the market, a second time via taxes for subsidies, and a third time to clean up the environmental and health mess.” Pretty has devoted considerable research effort to getting a clearer picture of the costs and benefits of modern agriculture. For 1999-2000, he assessed the negative side effects of agriculture in Great Britain. When elements such as pesticide removal from water, off-site costs of soil erosion and bacterial outbreaks were included, Pretty found “hidden” costs (in U.S. equivalents) of about $85 per acre. When considering the full costs of food in Great Britain over the same period, he found the equivalent of $7.4 billion per year in “hidden” costs. The major contributors to the “full cost” accounting included the externalities previously noted, and transportation costs from the farm to processing site, distribution and retails outlets, and to consumers’ homes. To provide some context, net annual farm income in Great Britain during the same period was approximately $2.8 billion, and consumer spending on food was about $150 billion. Pretty emphasizes the need to talk about these side effects and the need to reduce the more costly ones. “But we’ll never get to zero costs for agriculture,” he added. “Costs can only be reduced.” Pretty also has looked at the productivity of alternative agricultural practices. He conducted a comprehensive study of more than 200 sustainable farming projects on 70 million acres in 52 countries. His analysis showed that the use of sustainable agriculture practices can lead to substantial increases in production, as much as 150 percent for some root crops. In his work, he has found only three counties that have explicit national policies in favor of sustainability: Switzerland, Cuba and Bhutan in central Asia. “By sustainable, I mean a country that seeks to make the best use of nature’s goods and services as well as human resources, and agriculture still contributes to the public good,” he said. “Many countries talk about it, but in actuality few have policies that truly contribute to sustainability, which is lamentable.” He said he hopes that in a decade, perhaps 30 to 40 countries might be working toward sustainability and “at least trying to do the right things.” The visit was sponsored by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and the Iowa State University Bioethics Program. A copy of Pretty's presentation, “Re-Thinking Agri-Culture: As if the Real World Matters,” is available on the Leopold Center web site at:
www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/pastevents/pretty/pretty.htm For more information, contact:
Also see Pretty's presentation, Re-Thinking Agri-Culture: As if the Real World Matters, on the Leopold Center web site [PDF]. |