Reality Cheques 3330 per cent for farm animals, and 30 per cent for domestic pets and horses. Only
one-fifth of the antibiotics and other antimicrobials used in modern agriculture are
for therapeutic treatment of clinical diseases, with four-fifths for prophylactic use and
growth promotion. The Centers for Disease Control say, ‘antimicrobial resistance is a
serious clinical and public health problem in the US’, and one estimate from the
Institute of Medicine suggests that such resistance costs $30 million per year. A UK
House of Lords select committee enquiry was even more alarmed, recently stating,
‘there is a continuing threat to human health from the imprudent use of antibiotics
in animals ... we may face the dire prospect of revisiting the pre-antibiotic era’.^35
In both Europe and North America, the most common forms of antimicrobial
resistance are to strains of antibiotics used in treating animals, and these are trans-
ferred to human patients. Some antibiotics, such as fluoroquinones and avoparcin,
used to treat infections in poultry and as growth promoters, are now associated
with dramatic increases in resistant diseases in humans. Fluoroquinone resistance
is thought to be the main factor why Campylobacter infections have become so
common in The Netherlands. As the WHO puts it, ‘Campylobacter species are
now the commonest cause of bacterial gasteroenteritis is developed countries, and
cases are predominantly associated with consumption of poultry’.^36 There is no
such thing as a cheap chicken.
Putting a Monetary Value on Agricultural Landscapes
Landscapes are culturally valuable, and the aesthetic value we gain from them owes
much to their emergence from agricultural practices. They are, of course, almost
impossible to value in monetary terms. However, many proxies can be used,
including how much governments are willing to pay farmers to produce certain
habitats or landscapes, how often the public visits the countryside, and how much
they spend when they get there. In the UK, several studies of agri-environmental
policies have sought to put a value on positive environmental and landscape out-
comes.^37 These schemes have attempted to restore some of the habitat and other
positive countryside attributes that were lost during intensification as well as pro-
tect those attributes not yet lost.
UK agri-environmental schemes have been designed to deliver benefits in sev-
eral forms, including biodiversity, landscape patterns, water quality, archaeological
sites and enhanced access. Benefits may accrue to those in the immediate area of a
scheme, to visitors from outside the area and to the public at large. The annual per-
household benefits, using a variety of valuation methods such as contingent valu-
ation, choice experiments and contingent ranking, vary from £2 to £30 pounds for
most Environmentally Sensitive Areas, rising to £140 for the Norfolk Broads and
£380 for Scottish machair grasslands. If we take the range of annual benefits per
household to be £10–30, and assume that this is representative of the average house-
holds’ preferences for all landscapes produced by agriculture, then this suggests