Reality Cheques - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 66

the public at large. The annual per-household benefits, using a variety of
valuation methods such as contingent valuation, choice experiments and
contingent ranking, vary from UK£2 to UK£30 for most environmentally
sensitive areas (ESAs), rising to UK£140 for the Norfolk Broads and
UK£380 for Scottish machair grasslands. If we take the range of annual
benefits per household to be UK£10 to UK£30, and assume that this is
representative of the average household's preferences for all landscapes
produced by agriculture, then this suggests national benefits of the order
of UK£200 million to UK£600 million. Expressed on a per hectare basis,
this suggests annual benefits of UK£20 to UK£60 per hectare of arable
and pasture land in the UK.
On the one hand, these are likely to be overestimates, assuming agri-
environment schemes have already targeted certain landscapes because of
their higher value. On the other hand, they could be substantial under-
estimates, as they do not value such benefits as pathogen-free foods,
uneroded soils, emission-free agriculture, and biodiversity-producing
systems. They also focus on the outcomes of a scheme rather than on the
whole landscape. There are too few studies to corroborate these data. One
study in the UK compared paired organic and non-organic farms, and
concluded that organic agriculture produces UK£75 to UK£125 per
hectare of positive externalities each year, with particular benefits for soil
health and wildlife. 39 As there are 3 million hectares of organic farming
in Europe, the annual positive externalities could be UK£300 million,
assuming that benefits hold for the many organic farming systems across
Europe.
Actual visits made to the countryside are another proxy measure of how
much we value landscapes. Each year in the UK, day and overnight visitors
make some 433 million visit-days to the countryside and another 118
million to the seaside. 40 The average spend per day or night varies from
nearly UK£17 for UK day visitors, to UK£33 for UK overnight visitors,
and just over UK£58 for overseas overnight visitors. This indicates that
the 551 million visit-days to the countryside and seaside result in spending
of UK£14 billion per year. This is 3.5 times greater than the annual public
subsidy of farming, and indicates just how much we value the landscape.
If it is clean water that is required, the value of an agricultural landscape
can be substantial - as New York State has found out with its support
for sustainable agriculture in the 500,000 hectare Catskill-Delaware
watershed complex. 41 New York City gets 90 per cent of its drinking water
from these watersheds, some 6 billion litres a day. In the late 1980s,
though, the city was faced with having to construct a filtration facility in
order to meet new drinking water standards, the cost of which would be
US$5 billion to US$8 billion dollars, plus another US$200 million to