Re: Environmentalists and Agriculturalists
Crafty (rijtaylo@silver.ucs.indiana.edu)
Wed, 29 Dec 1993 18:13:48 -0500 (EST)
Bill:
> Agriculturists
> (whatever that is) are thought to be slow to embrace environmental issues.
> Why should they when they are faced with the economic consequence of
> narrowing an already narrow margin? Moreover, inherently there is little
> logic to the idea that someone would want to overtly degrade a system that
> is the reason for their being.
Margins contract when labor is replaced by capital. As once
happened in the oil industry, the amount of labor now necessary to
produce a given amt. of output has fallen to a point where the output
itself is almost not worth selling except that the State bails out the
producer with price supports and regulation of production.
Since sustainable ag systems are typically labor- rather than
capital-intensive, their margins are likewise larger. The difficulty
arises that in a capitalist economy competition promotes
capitalization to drives prices down, taking margins with it. So this
is where margins went in the first place and it's where they're
still going, stewardship costs or no.
The stewardship costs that you seem to refer to (you are not
specific about it) are usually in the form of labor costs, ie lower
total product for labor expended. Consumers' demanding sustainably
produced, higher priced foods is what might bring margins back from
the brink.
Plus:
All factors of production can essentially be categorized as
land, labor, or capital. In the prevailing neoclassical economic
thinking, these three are held to be "infinitely substitutable" for
each other. So in a capitalist world, the unavoidable solution to the
problem of competition is to lower labor costs *and* land stewardship
costs by ever-increasing capitalization. This "substitutability"
fallacy is what is responsible for the degradation of the land, and
this is why I find your remark about "the idea that someone would want
to overtly degrade a system that is the reason for their being" to be
wrongly applied.
The increases in total product attendant upon industrial
agriculture do *not* derive from the land itself; the land be damned.
The gains derive from the intensified use of capital inputs and it is
this "system" of capital flow that the "someone" wants taken care of.
--
___________________________________
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ KRONSTADT 1921- NIKOGDA NE ZABYVAEM @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@