Reality Cheques - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 57

activities that are costly to society, even if the private benefits are substantial.
The types of externalities encountered in the agricultural sector have
several features. Their costs are often neglected, and often occur with a
time lag. They often damage groups whose interests are not represented,
and the identity of the producer of the externality is not always known. 8
In practice, there is little agreed data on the economic cost of agri-
cultural externalities. This is partly because the costs are highly dispersed
and affect many sectors of economies. It is also necessary to know about
the value of nature's goods and services, and what happens when these
largely unmarketed goods are lost. Since the current system of economic
accounting grossly underestimates the current and future value of natural
capital, this makes the task even more difficult. 9 It is relatively easy, for
example, to count the remedial treatment costs that follow pollution
incidents; but it is much more difficult to value, for example, skylarks
singing on a summer's day, and the costs incurred when they are lost.
Several studies have recently put a cost on the negative externalities of
agriculture in China, Germany, the Netherlands, the Philippines, the UK
and the US. 10 When it is possible to make the calculations, our under-
standing of what is the best or most efficient form of agriculture can change
rapidly. In the Philippines, researchers from the International Rice
Research Institute found that modern rice cultivation was costly to human
health. They investigated the health status of rice farmers who were
exposed to pesticides, and estimated the monetary costs of significantly
increased incidence of eye, skin, lung and neurological disorders. By
incorporating these within the economics of pest control, they found that
modern high-input pesticide systems suffer twice. For example, with nine
pesticide sprays per season, they returned less per hectare than the integrated
pest management strategies and cost the most in terms of ill health. Any
expected positive production benefits of applying pesticides were over-
whelmed by the health costs. Rice production using natural control
methods exhibits multifunctionality by contributing positively both to human
health and by sustaining food production. 11
At the University of Essex, we recently developed a new framework
to study the negative externalities of UK agriculture. This framework uses
seven cost categories to assess negative environmental and health costs,
such as damage to water, air, soil and biodiversity, and damage to human
health by pesticides, micro-organisms and disease agents. The analysis of
damage and monitoring costs counted only external costs; private costs
borne by farmers themselves, such as increased pest or weed resistance
from pesticide overuse, were not included. We conservatively estimated
that the external costs of UK agriculture, almost all of which is modern-
ized and industrialized, were at least UK$1.5 billion to UK£2 billion each