Editorial Introduction to Volume II 3Part 1: Agricultural Harm to the Environment
The first paper is the iconic opening chapter to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is
just two pages in length, and is entitled A Fable for Tomorrow. Written in the early
1960s, and later to influence generations of scientists, consumers and policy mak-
ers, it is a story of modern society and the consequences of environmental and
social decay. It is told as a fable, which is clever. It does not seek to be analytical or
specific to one set of circumstances. The fable generalizes, and so must be inaccu-
rate about certain places. But its very nature captures attention, and shows how
Carson was so influential. It starts, ‘there was once a town in the heart of America’,
and describes its checkerboard of prosperous farms, with oak and maple and birch,
and foxes barking in the hills. Fish swum in the streams that flowed clear and cold
out of the hills. But ‘then a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began
to change’. Some evil spirit settled on the community, and no one knew why.
There was a strange stillness. The birds were silent: ‘it was a spring without voices’.
The tragedy is, of course, that ‘the people had done it themselves’ with their adop-
tion of modern agricultural methods.
In the second article, an excerpt from the 2002 book, Agri-Culture, Jules Pretty
indicates that the real costs of food are much higher than the price paid in the
shop. Environmental externalities and the diversion of tax revenue to subsidize
agriculture contribute to the real cost. Agriculture, like any economic sector, has
both negative and positive side effects, and it is the movement towards a more
multifunctional view of agriculture that could result in a better understanding of
what contributes to agricultural sustainability. This paper summarizes the first
study of the full costs of a national agricultural sector. In the UK, these amounted
to some £1.5 billion per year during the 1990s. These external costs are alarming –
and should call into question what is meant by efficiency. Increased sustainability
in agricultural systems can only happen if these external costs are substantially
reduced.
In the third paper, Erin Tegtmeier and Michael Duffy analyse the full cost of
modern agricultural production in the US. These are of the order of $5.6–16.9
billion per year (in 2002 $), arising from damage to water resources, soils, air,
wildlife and biodiversity, and harm to human health. Additional annual costs of
$3.7 billion arise from agency costs associated with programmes to address these
problems or encourage a transition towards more sustainable systems. Following
various partial studies published in the 1990s, this was the first study of the costs
of the whole of the agricultural sector in the US. As the authors indicate, ‘many in
the US pride themselves on our cheap food. But this study demonstrates that con-
sumers pay for food well beyond the grocery store.’
The fourth article by Steve Sherwood and co-authors is a chapter drawn from
the 2005 book, The Pesticide Detox. It focuses on pesticide use and its effects in the
highland region of Carchi in the northern Andes. Farmers use a wide range of
pesticides, both hazardous and benign, and although local and international busi-
nesses indicate that highly toxic products can be used safely, the evidence from the