Notes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 198

2 See Astor and Rowntree, 1945, pp33, 47.
3 For more on George Stapledon, see Conford (1988) The Organic Tradition,
pp192-193, 196-197.
4 Despite my regular use of these five terms as capitals, I agree with the
misgivings that many have. Capital implies an asset, and assets should be looked
after, protected and built up. But as a term, capital is problematic for two reasons:
it implies measurability and transferability. Because the value of something can
be assigned a single monetary value, it appears to matter not if it is lost because
we could simply allocate the required money to buy another, or transfer it from
elsewhere. However, we know that this is nonsense. Nature and its cultural and
social meanings are not so easily replaceable. Nature is not a commodity,
reducible only to monetary values. Nonetheless, as terms, natural capital and
social capital have their uses in reshaping thinking around basic questions, such
as what is agriculture for, and what system works best? For further discussions,
see Benton, 1998; Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988, 1990; Putnam, 1995;
Costanza et al, 1999; Benton, 1998; Carney, 1998; Flora, 1998; Grootaert,
1998; Ostrom, 1998; Pretty, 1998; Scoones, 1998; Uphoff, 1998; Pretty and
Ward, 2001.
5 Worster, 1993, p92.
6 See Pretty, 1998; FAO, 1999; Conway and Pretty, 1991; Altieri, 1995;
Pingali and Roger, 1995; Conway, 1997.
7 For more on the definitions and principles of sustainable agriculture, see
Altieri, 1995, 1999; Thrupp, 1996; Conway, 1997; Pretty, 1995, 1998;
Drinkwater et al, 1998; Tilman, 1998; Hinchliffe et al, 1999; Zhu et al., 2000;
Wolfe, 2000.
8 An externality is any action that affects the welfare of, or opportunities
available to, an individual or group without direct payment or compensation, and
may be positive or negative. See Baumol and Oates, 1988; Pearce and Turner,
1990; EEA, 1998; Brouwer, 1999; Pretty et al, 2000. Economists distinguish
between 'technological' or physical externalities, and 'pecuniary', or price effect,
externalities. Pecuniary externalities arise, for example, when individuals or firms
purchase or sell large enough quantities of a good or service to affect price levels.
The change in price levels affects people who are not directly involved in the
original transactions, but who now face higher or lower prices as a result of those
original transactions. These pecuniary externalities help some groups and hurt
others, but they do not necessarily constitute a 'failure' of the market economy.
An example of a pecuniary externality is the rising cost of housing for local
people in rural villages that results from higher-income workers from metro-
politan areas moving away from urban cores and bidding up the price of housing
in those villages. Pecuniary externalities are a legitimate public concern, and may
merit a public policy response. Technological externalities, however, do constitute
a form of 'market failure'. Dumping pesticides sewage into a lake, without
payment by the polluter to those who are adversely affected, is a classic example
of a technological externality. The market fails in this instance because more
pollution occurs than would be the case if the market or other institutions caused