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Forum

Greening of Agriculture for Long-Term Sustainability

Agron. and Hortic. Dep., Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68583-0915

^* Corresponding author (cfrancis2{at}unl.edu)

Received for publication January 9, 2004.

	ABSTRACT

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
Consolidation and growth of large corporations in U.S. agriculture are facing increasing scrutiny from a consumer public with growing awareness of environment issues. More people in society now question not only where food is grown and what types of practices impact the environment, but how the benefits are distributed. Although driven by short-term economics in many purchasing decisions, consumers are asking whether we could continue our standard of living while maintaining the natural resource base and not polluting the environment. Agricultural corporations are responding to this consumer concern by greening some of their operations and especially greening their images. Is this a real conversion in methods and products or merely a "greenwashing" of the corporate image? Large corporations face economic, environmental, and social challenges in their quest for an improved image. Examples in five major areas illustrate the impacts of corporate agriculture: industrial organic food production, consolidation of farms, genetically modified organisms, global food systems, and unregulated capitalism and limited-liability corporations. Each is related to structural conditions in agriculture, and each must be addressed by corporations that are serious about improving their images with consumers. To deal with these issues that impact both farmers and consumers, positive alternatives to conventional mainstream business approaches are discussed.

	INTRODUCTION

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
WE LIVE IN A U.S. CULTURE that is driven by short-term economics. Some would argue that all neoclassical economics is short term. Our planning frames in industry, government, and university are short—annual budgets, 2- to 6-yr terms of office, 5-yr plans, and, on occasion, decade-long goals. In contrast, the time frame for sustainability is forever. Such a contradiction in time spectra is one of the overarching concerns that must be addressed in the quest for agricultural sustainability, especially in greening the corporate segment of this industry.

Our local and national economies are rapidly turning into one global system, and the accountability of multinational corporations is to their stockholders rather than to the general public. Globalization is proving to be a stimulus for economic development to some degree in developing countries, but the majority of benefits are flowing from the labor in the Third World to the accounts and dividends of corporations in the First World. Rather than a trickle down of benefits, there is a flood up of profits to those with capital to invest and knowledge to implement and control the manufacturing, supply, and marketing chain. This inequity in benefits must be addressed if we are concerned about the social consequences of current development and the need for long-term sustainability. This forum article describes the agricultural dimensions of a larger effort by corporate organizations to green their images for the purpose of assuring customers that they are, in fact, in tune with the current public concern about the environment (Waage and Francis, 2004).

Food systems are imbedded in this globalizing economy. The current food system brings a multiplicity of products from all parts of the world to supermarkets of the North at a relatively cheap cost, available mostly to wealthy consumers. Although the system does support jobs in production agriculture and processing in lesser-developed countries, those who benefit the most are large landowners and multinational corporations that control the supply and marketing chains.

Distribution of benefits must be addressed if large corporate farms and food companies are serious about greening their operations and images. The search for environmentally sound and socially acceptable business procedures that will help improve corporations in the eyes of consumers is admirable, but the current search is based on questionable assumptions about future realities in the economy, society, and the environment. Corporations need to explore alternatives. To ignore society's concerns about equity of benefits and impacts on the environment is to assume that fine-tuning the current system will lead to sustainability while ignoring conceptual problems and structural instabilities. Assumptions about our system and its future must be made explicit and alternatives explored if this is to be a serious venture.

This essay explores current assumptions by corporations about the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of agricultural sustainability and then examines five key issues that serve as examples of the challenges we face and must resolve as a global community. Transparency in goals and an ability to deal with these issues will provide legitimacy and a more secure future to those agricultural corporations intent on charting a greener course and contributing to sustainable development.

	ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
The first major issue is the current and necessary business focus on a short time frame for measuring economic sustainability. In a corporate world where the fortunes of individual players are determined by quarterly earnings and annual dividends, there is an obvious opportunity cost to investing in long-term projects in agriculture. This creates an obvious disconnect with any reasonable approach to evaluating long-term farming sustainability. Farmers plant long-term rotations of crops and permanent pastures and often think of multiple generations in the family that will manage a farm. Since it is unlikely that corporate business procedures and reporting will change, the very least that can be done is to recognize the inconsistencies in the time frames and accept that current accounting is unrealistic to measure real agricultural sustainability, except as shown by consistent returns to investors. It is obvious that we need a longer time frame for planning and sustainability.

A second issue is monetary measurement as the sole indicator of returns, an admittedly artificial means of evaluation that externalizes many costs, discounts the future, and passes debts and environmental challenges on to future generations. To make any rational environmental assessment of costs and returns, there needs to be some type of ecological or natural accounting, in parallel with the current monetary system, that will make these transactions more realistic in terms of long-term sustainability. We obviously need some type of currency to keep track of current transactions and exchange of goods and services, but this should be supplemented with some rational measure of ecological capital to be useful in the quest for sustainability. We need an ecological accounting, one that includes a measure of resource availability for our generation as well as for people in the future, an equity in distribution of benefits, and one that includes health of the ecosystem for ourselves and other species (Daily, 1997).

An important issue in economics is the pursuit of efficiency of scale and the accepted axiom that growth is essential for economic development and improved quality of life. In field crop production, agricultural economists have shown that efficiencies of scale for major commodity crops do not increase beyond a modest farm size of about one section (640 acres), contrary to the conventional wisdom in the farming community and in agricultural economics classrooms at our universities (Ahearn et al., 1993; Hallam, 1993). Larger farms that result from consolidation merely increase the size of equipment needed and the hours that are required to farm that land while most of the benefits of larger operations are government payments passed through the farmers' hands to the corporations that provide increasingly costly production inputs. While farmers increase their farm size and debt load to reap small margins on commodity crops, the major beneficiaries are the input suppliers and the multinational grain traders. We need an objective and realistic approach to measuring efficiency and sustainability. The situation of consolidation in agriculture reflects similar trends and challenges to be solved in other sectors, for example, the "big box retailer" that is replacing family-owned businesses and local entrepreneurs in many rural communities.

	ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
The tragedy of the commons, where resources are shared by everyone and there is no economic incentive for individual stewardship (Hardin and Baden, 1977), is alive and well in our current industrial agriculture. Virtually all farmland is privately owned, yet some production resources are captured from outside the farm boundaries and negative impacts of inappropriate practices are often externalized. Water for irrigation may be supplied by subsidized, federally funded projects and arrive from distant places in the watershed. Erosion of soil during a hard rain event may be due to lack of vegetative ground cover or crop residues, and the costs of reduced water quality as a result of contamination with dissolved nutrients or chemical pesticides are borne by society. Likewise, the costs of cleaning culverts and roadside ditches, and even dredging of waterways and lakes, are passed on to the general public. Some costs may be immediate, for example, the need for a downstream community to filter their water supply, while others may be passed on to future generations, for example, the need for a new flood-control dam after a reservoir is filled with silt from farm fields.

Another area where the global commons is important is in C emissions, including those produced by agricultural equipment operations; by manufacture of fertilizers, machinery, and pesticides; and from livestock. The ecological footprint measures indicate that the USA currently puts over twice as much C into the atmosphere than we can absorb back through green vegetation (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). With only 5% of the global population consuming about 25% of fossil fuels, this is not a surprising indicator. The USA exports this excess CO₂ to other countries, and it is a major contributor to global warming. In evaluating the sustainability of operations of any corporation or farm, we should use some valid criterion for an ecological balance of payments, and this is unlikely to be in contemporary monetary terms. When we search for credible measures or indicators of sustainability, the C balance seems a logical place to start on accountability.

Any corporation, government, or family that spends its economic capital will over time become bankrupt. It is no different when we spend our ecological capital at a rate that exceeds the natural replacement of this capital. When soil erodes at more than 11 Mg ha^–1 yr^–1, this exceeds the natural rate of formation of soil from the parent material below (Brady and Weil, 2002). We can mask the effects of this depletion by application of chemical fertilizers, but this is only a short-term fix. When land is a commodity to be bought and sold by large corporations, according to short-term returns compared with other areas of investment, there are decisions made on single-year productivity and rewards for mining the soil. Family farms that endure over generations have a different concept focused on stewardship, and they use farming methods that incorporate green-manure crops for N return, integrate crops and livestock for local recycling of nutrients, and maintain residues on the soil surface to prevent or minimize erosion. Family farmers often choose enterprises that can be processed and/or sold nearby and thus contribute to the local community. Money spent on inputs and paid for crops harvested is cycled several times within the community.

Toxic chemicals put into the environment can have drastic effects on the reproduction of birds and mammals as well as cause disruption of some natural cycles in the soil and water systems. The biosphere is an amazingly forgiving system, with a tremendous capacity for buffering the effects of many applied substances. But when there is no evolutionary experience in dealing with new synthetic compounds, these can have a permanent disrupting influence on food webs and the entire ecosystem. The lessons of Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring are becoming more obvious as we increase the intensity of production on our most favorable lands. We need biological substitutes for current chemical practices to control plant and animal pests and integrated pest management practices in both conventional and organic systems.

"Who speaks for the trees?" asked the Lorax in a famous Dr. Suess book for children. Our anthropocentric approach to conservation of nature assumes that resources are here for our exploitation and that the natural ecosystem is to be dominated for our short-term economic needs. It is essential that we recognize ourselves as one more species in a complex ecosystem and that we are subject to most of the same forces as other co-inhabitants of the planet. This is a critical step for our own preservation as a species, so we should begin to act in our own vested interests to understand and respect natural processes, other species, larger ecosystems, how we protect other species, and how we depend on all of them.

	SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
The industrial paradigm considers humans as management, labor, and potential consumers, rather than as people with aspirations and basic human needs. When corporations enter farming and food processing, they contribute to and deal with long supply chains. There may be difficulty understanding, much less enforcing, any specific codes of social conduct or just rewards for contributions to the laborers for those affiliated with the food chain, especially in Third World countries. Consolidation of farmland is one form of concentrating wealth in the current globalizing economy, a trend that will not build social justice nor long-term social stability or sustainability. Impacts of the NAFTA agreement on farmers both in the USA and Mexico are only now beginning to be manifest. Recent scandals in Enron and WorldCom do little to boost consumer and client confidence in the industrial corporate culture, and there is little reason to think that the situation will be different in corporate agriculture.

The current economic paradigm is focused on individual wealth and accumulation of land and capital. Marty Strange (1988), a critic of the current economic support system in U.S. farming, suggested in his book Family Farming: A New Economic Vision that we are rapidly developing in this country a skewed land ownership pattern than many of our European ancestors left the Old World to escape. If we are concerned about equity and social justice, we need to seek models that will maintain a broad ownership of land and resources as envisioned by Jefferson and promoted by the original mission of the land grant university system. Cooperation should be the guideline rather than uncontrolled competition. We should seek rich experiences and quality of life rather than accumulation of wealth and things.

Other social challenges emerge from the current industrial model. The globalization of economies and food systems leads to a homogeneity in foods and culture and a loss of local identity. This is exemplified by the numbers of McDonald's, Burger Kings, and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that have erupted in most countries over the past two decades (Nestle, 2002; Schlosser, 2001). Although the customers in these fast-food outlets are exercising their free choice in purchasing global food, we need to recognize the power of advertising and the eventual impacts of such globalization on local economies, food systems, human health, and local cultures. These economic moves are not without social consequences, and we need to understand the process and make decisions about what we value for the future.

	FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE IMPACT

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
Here are five specific trends in today's rapidly globalizing agricultural and food economy, all of which depend on continued technological advancement and assumptions of perfect trade and unlimited fossil fuels. We know that a completely free and open trading system has never been possible due to long supply lines, political disagreements, and costs of transaction at the global level. It is becoming evident that our current economies are based on a bubble of available fossil fuel energy and that this situation will change drastically in the next two generations. How will those of us in agriculture deal with future challenges to economies, ecosystems, and social systems?

Industrial Organic Food Production
A rapid consolidation in the organic food industry through purchase of smaller, successful companies by multinational food corporations is causing extensive debate among organic food producers. The positive outcomes of widespread use of organic practices may include a cleaner environment as we discontinue use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers on more acres in agriculture, build greater awareness by the public and availability of organic food, and find lower prices for these products in the supermarket. Negative outcomes seen by most of the founders of the strong organic food industry in the USA and Europe include ignoring regional autonomy and importance of local food systems; abandoning local adaptation of crops, animals, and systems to unique ecological conditions; disregarding the rights of farm laborers and equity in distribution of benefits, one goal of the majority of organic producers; creating a global and fragile food system that is less stable than local food systems; and concentrating control and decision making in a few corporations—characteristics that are shared with the current global, conventional system. There is strong support within the original organic-farming community to invoke stronger rules that govern the social dimensions of farming in the certification procedures. How this question is resolved will depend on assumptions about the future and the desirability of global vs. local food systems.

Consolidation of Farms
The century-long trend toward larger farming operations in the USA has accelerated in recent years as federal support programs for a handful of commodity crops and increased use of mechanization and other technologies have favored perceived efficiencies of scale and elimination of many small farms. The positives are seen as efficiency of large equipment and spreading its cost over many acres and the cheap food that results from low commodity prices and consequent low prices for meat and poultry. The negatives include loss of biodiversity as farms move toward monoculture and homogenize the landscape, confined animal operations and concentration of manure in specialized animal-feeding facilities, loss of most entrepreneurial family farm operations and an increase in minimum-wage jobs in their place, decline in vitality of rural communities as population is reduced and infrastructure disappears, concentration of benefits from farming into fewer hands, and decline in quality of life in communities that are part of an industrial-farming landscape. Again, this trend in consolidation is driven by federal programs as well as an acceptance of an industrial model for farming and food systems that reflects a disregard for health of the biological and social rural landscape.

Genetically Modified Organisms
Growing use of transgenic crops is a contentious issue, especially among people in Europe, Japan, and other important trading partners of the USA. In this country, there is a tacit acceptance of new techniques in microbial biology for gene transfer that is in keeping with our reliance on technology to solve any new problems; elsewhere, there is more skepticism and concern that we should be more oriented toward a precautionary approach to use of questionable technologies. Positives given for use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) include potential to incorporate genetic resistance to pests, improvement of quality factors and pharmaceutical properties, simplified management that allows farmers to cover more acres, and increased yields. There is little evidence for increased production, except where some major limiting insect or disease problem drastically reduces current yields. Negatives include the potential for gene escape to wild populations and super-resistant weeds; ineffectiveness of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) or other biological resistance mechanisms when they are widely applied, including loss of this technology for organic farmers; lack of new products to replace widely used products such as glyphosate [N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine] for when weeds become resistant; suspected negative human health effects; concentration of ownership of the genetic material in a few corporations that become monopolies; and opportunity costs of research resources dedicated to this approach at the expense of other plant breeding and agronomic strategies for yield improvement. There is much more to be learned about these controversial techniques and their consequences, and a precautionary approach should be considered as we continue the research process.

Global Food Systems
The globalized food system is an emerging reality that is a product of information, transportation, and financial technologies. This trend is often accepted as a given part of the future rather than one among many options. The positive outcomes are creation of new markets, both North and South; availability of new and different products from exotic sources; and food products of a wide variety in markets of the North through the entire year. Negatives include a homogeneity of crops, foods, diets, and culture that leads to loss of local identity; fragility of a system that depends on long supply lines, free movement of labor and capital, and cheap fossil fuels; a shift to export crops from needed food crops in developing countries; and an unequal distribution of benefits and exploitation of people and resources by the North. An important reality is that the majority of global citizens do not participate in nor benefit from the current trend toward globalization.

Unregulated Capitalism and Limited-Liability Corporations
Current implementation of capitalism as the dominant system on a global scale essentially without regulation depends on the assumption that the free market works. The system rewards initiative and provides capital for growth and development where there is potential for profits and consistent returns to stockholders. The system currently benefits mostly those in the North who have this capital and the companies in the system that collect transportation and other transaction costs. Some farmers in both developed and developing nations have benefited to some degree by access to new markets, but in the overview, most farmers have suffered due to competition among countries and systems with vastly different standards of living, costs of labor, levels of technology, and access to information and markets. Negative impacts have included unfair competition and dumping of commodities below costs of production, unequal distribution of benefits among the players in this global system, lack of personal accountability and responsibility in individual corporate players, and creation of a global economic colonialism that has evolved from the forms of domination that appeared to be overcome over the past two centuries with independence of former political colonies.

	CONCLUSIONS

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
These overarching concerns about the quest for long-term sustainability must be taken into consideration as we seek strategies for a true greening of agricultural corporations and their activities. How we define sustainability—the time frame, the boundary issues, and the reliance on current fossil fuels—depends very much on the assumptions we make about global economic and social stability. This in turn is influenced by our world view of nature and about natural ecosystems and resources. Making these assumptions explicit is essential if there is to be credibility of programs with nonprofit environmental groups, organizations concerned with social justice and equity, and the general public.

Some of the concerns derive from vastly different world views among participants in the food system. Many people see our human species as unique in terms of ownership of the planet and its resources and that we should have no qualms about using this place for our own economic betterment and creature comforts. For those who strongly believe in neoclassical economics and the power of the marketplace, it is assumed that any scarcity in natural resources will be adjusted for by the price of those materials in the market. However, this approach externalizes many costs and usually does not include the environmental impacts nor long-term social consequences of economic decisions. For others who see our species as one more among many millions, and one that currently appropriates a highly disproportionate fraction of resources for our use, the short-term market approach is short sighted and destructive. These people believe that we share the planet with other life forms and in the health of the ecosystem lies our own potential for continued survival. It is difficult to reconcile these two points of view, but the precautionary principle suggests that we need to carefully consider the latter.

The greening of agriculture, with special attention to players in the corporate sector, is essential if we are to seek a path toward long-term sustainability. But this obviously needs to be much more than the greening of an image. Serious consideration of limited natural resources, efficient and judicious use of nonrenewable resources, and care for the environment in which we all live is critical to health of the ecosystem and our own well-being. We must take a broad view of the environment, a long-term perspective on resource use, and a practical outlook on what is possible with current resources and population plus those projected for the future. We need a thoughtful sorting out of our needs versus our wants. It should be possible to find a middle course that supports local economies and promotes a modest amount of trade while fostering an individual entrepreneurial spirit that builds community and society without destroying the resource base on which we depend.

	NOTES

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
Published as Agricultural Research Division J. Ser. No. 14448, Inst. of Agric. and Nat. Res., Univ. of Nebraska–Lincoln.

	REFERENCES

TOP NOTES ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ECONOMIC CHALLENGES AND... ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND... SOCIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FIVE AREAS OF CORPORATE... CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 

• Ahearn, M.C., G.W. Whittaker, and H. El-Osta. 1993. The production cost-size relationship: Measurement issues and estimates for three major crops. p. 107–149. In A. Hallam (ed.) Size, structure, and the changing face of American agriculture. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
• Brady, N.C., and R.R. Weil. 2002. The nature and properties of soils. 13th ed. Prentice Hall Publ., Upper Saddle River, NJ.
• Carson, R. 1962. Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Publ., New York, NY.
• Daily, G.C. (ed.) 1997. Nature's services: Societal dependence on natural ecosystems. Island Press, Covelo, CA.
• Hallam, A. 1993. Empirical studies of size, structure, and efficiency in agriculture. p. 204–231. In A. Hallam (ed.) Size, structure, and the changing face of American agriculture. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
• Hardin, G., and J. Baden (ed.) 1977. Managing the commons. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, CA.
• Nestle, M. 2002. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley.
• Schlosser, E. 2001. Fast food nation: The dark side of the all-American meal. Houghton Mifflin Publ., New York.
• Strange, M. 1988. Family farming: A new economic vision. Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
• Waage, S., and C. Francis. 2004. The elephant in the room: Core stumbling blocks to operationalize sustainability concepts in large corporations [Online]. Available at www.greenmoneyjournal.com/. GreenMoney J. Summer 2004 Issue.
• Wackernagel, M., and W. Rees. 1996. Our ecological footprint: Reducing human impact on the earth. New Soc. Publ., Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.

This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Free Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in ISI Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via ISI Web of Science (1) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Francis, C. A. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Francis, C. A. Agricola Articles by Francis, C. A. Related Collections Economics Ecosystem Management Sustainable Agriculture Watershed-Scale Studies Global Change Agricultural Systems Production Agriculture