Internalizing the Societal Costs of Agricultural Production

Societies and social groups within them are becoming aware that food and fiber are not gifts of nature that come to us cost-free from the natural world because their production involves consumption of renewable and nonrenewable resources as well as expenses for capital and variable inputs in the production process, plus outlays for transportation, processing, marketing, and food preparation. The essence of food and fiber production is that on one hand, the key production resources (seeds, tubers, soil, manures, and rain water) are renewable resources, thus potentially enabling agriculture to be a highly sustainable activity. On the other hand, agriculture has some actual or potential characteristics of an extractive industry, similar to mining, and accordingly has the potential to be highly unsustainable. In addition, food and fiber production may involve long-term nonenvironmental costs (e.g. impacts on workers, communities, regions, and consumers) to a greater or lesser degree. In this paper, I use the expression “societal costs” of agriculture to pertain to adverse impacts of agrofood systems on human health, environmental quality, and the welfare and livelihoods of social groups. (A focus on the societal costs of food and fiber production does not, of course, involve a presumption that the benefits of this production, both to humans and non-human portions of the biosphere, are insignificant.)