Agriculture Reference
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the stability of such sinks depends on their susceptibility to fire and/or
pests). This has been most evident in the US Pacific North West (PNW)
and BC, where large tracts of old growth have been removed from the
working forest and protected in perpetuity. 4 The problems with such zoning
is that it leads to variances, which have slowly eroded protected areas
(Sinclair 2000). Nonetheless, zoning has been promoted in California
(Vaux 1973) and BC (Sahajananthan et al. 1998) as appropriate means for
conserving non-timber amenities, and thus addressing market failure.
There are problems with state intervention via regulation. First, it
is likely to be expensive and ineffective in the longer run. Regulations lead
to bureaucratic red tape that increases costs. This has been the case in BC
where the Forest Practices Code is estimated to add more than $1 billion
annually to the costs of harvesting trees on public lands, or some $15-$20
per (Haley 1996). In comparison, social benefits (including C flux
benefits) appear small (van Kooten 1999). A regulatory environment also
creates opportunities and incentives for corruption: those enforcing
regulations can be bribed in various ways (not always monetary) to
overlook certain contraventions of the law (perhaps because regulations
can be interpreted in more than one way), while politicians might grant
variances to the zoning ordinance in order to gain support (“bribes”) from
industry or to please voters ( e.g., local communities, forest-sector workers).
There are suggestions that valuable forested areas in BC Provincial Parks
have been removed for logging to support industry and workers, only to be
replaced by an equal or larger area of previously logged or poorer-quality
forestland (Sinclair 2000). Similarly, in 1997, Venezuela permitted logging
in the country's largest forest reserve - the 37,000 Sierra Imataca
rainforest reserve near the Guyanese border - when fibre prices rose
( The
Economist 1997).
Second, if governments are truly concerned about the environment,
they need to be more careful in making decisions about land use. Thus,
Sinclair (2000) complains that governments have been quick to identify
protected ecosystems, but have not made available adequate funds to
protect them from encroachment, while Pressey (2000) demonstrates that,
in Australia, governments have only put into reserves public lands that are
marginal for protection of biodiversity. Governments want to be seen as
promoting biodiversity, as providing nature, but are unwilling to incur the
budgetary costs that are required. They are also unwilling to rely on
markets on ideological grounds, even when there are benefits to so doing
(for a discussion, see Sowell 1999; also Pearse 1998).
Finally, a regulatory environment often leads to a classic principal-
agent problem. This is truer for regulations involving harvesting methods
and silvicultural investments that are aimed at protecting nature than for
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