Environmental Accounts for Agriculture - United Kingdom
DEFRA, 2008
Content
- Quantification of all external/non-market effects of agriculture (that is, an account of all public ‘bads’ and goods arising from agriculture) for the UK
Findings
Comment
- Despite remarkable intellectual effort, quantification of agriculture’s external effects remains elusive. For instance, the damages to marine water quality are calculated only from the risk for swimmers to suffer a stomach upset and the lost days bathing due to water quality below minimum standards. The larger costs to the environment, fishermen, the tourist industry etc are not included. Another major problem for using the study in the policy debate is that the counterfactual scenario is ‘no agriculture’: the land used for agriculture simply disappears with agriculture. But many of the positive effects for which agriculture is credited would remain (or even expand) if the land was left to its own.
- Nevertheless, the study yields interesting insights. The net effect of agriculture turns out to be clearly negative. The repeated claims in the policy debate about the extraordinary multifunctional services of agriculture need to be substantiated much more solidly - the simple enumeration of landscape and habitat services of agriculture cannot justify subsidies. And the positive effects need to be balanced against agriculture’s negative effects
- Some negative effects – notably through increased flooding and deteriorated air quality – receive little attention in public but are estimated to be substantial.