Climate Change and Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 461

Degradation

Knowledge

Full costing

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Income

Figure 18.1 Hypothetical Relationships between Farmer Income and Soil Degradation
Source: Pinstrup-Andersen and Watson (2011)

Investments in agricultural productivity, particularly investments that improve soil qual-
ity or require less water (e.g., crop rotation and mulching), will increase farmer incomes
and reduce environmental pressures. Improving soil fertility, increasing forest cover, and
improving access to other environmental goods will increasingly relax the constraints
farmers face, increasing agricultural productivity and reduce poverty. The Nkonya et al
(2008) meta-analysis and study in Uganda provides empirical evidence that this is not
merely wishful theorizing, but an empirical reality. They conclude that modernizing
African agriculture can produce these triple wins. Additional evidence suggests that pub-
lic goods such as education and social capital assets may also succeed in accomplishing
multiple goals simultaneously (Granja e Barros, Mendonça, and Nogueira 2002).
The top line in Stages 2 and 3 follow the typical EKC stories. Greater market access
reduces the costs of deforestation; increased incomes encourage farmers to overuse
or misuse chemical inputs resulting in soil and water degradation. Eventually higher
income levels reach the point that policy changes, consumer demand, or increasing
returns to scale lead to reducing environmental impacts. However, there is no reason to
expect that the current EKC in a country for a particular pollutant is fixed permanently.
As technology processes improve in developed countries, better technologies become
cheaper for developing countries to acquire, lowering the peak of the EKC (as in the
middle line of Figure 18.1 labeled “Knowledge”). Increased international public goods
and political pressure from developed countries may also succeed in lowering the peak
or shifting it to the left. Lomborg (2001) demonstrates that these factors are already at
play: environmental degradation is peaking out at a lower level in today's developing
countries than in developed countries' past.
The trade-off between growth and the environment can be reduced by investment
in agricultural productivity. There are numerous technocratic fixes that would produce
considerable and consistent triple wins. Water quality can be improved and water use
lowered by improving irrigation systems that reduce in-transit evaporation and leak-
age, installing sprinkler and drip systems, and introducing mulch to reduce on-farm
evaporation (Bruns and Meinzen-Dick 2000; Knox, Meinzen-Dick, and Hazell 2002).