Tag – big ag good pt. 2

Debates about the social and environmental impacts of America’s food system cannot be disentangled from the basic reality that in a modern industrialized society, most people will live in cities and suburbs and will not work in agriculture. As a result, most food will need to be produced by large farms, with little labor, far away from the people who will consume it. Many sustainable agriculture advocates tout the  of organic agriculture as proof that an alternative food system is possible. But growing market share vastly overstates how much food is actually produced organically. In reality, organic production accounts for little more than  of total U.S. agricultural land use. Meanwhile, only a bit more than  of food sales come from organic producers, mostly because organic sales are overwhelmingly concentrated in high-value sectors of the market, namely produce and dairy, and fetch a premium from well-heeled consumers. Moreover, organic farms, large and small, don’t actually outperform large conventional farms by many important environmental measures. Scale, technology, and productivity make good environmental sense and economic sense. Because organic farming requires more land for every calorie or pound produced, a  to organic farming would entail converting more forest and other land to farming, resulting in greater habitat loss and more greenhouse gas emissions. And while organic farming doesn’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, it often results in greater nitrogen pollution because manure is a highly inefficient way to deliver nutrients to crops. Another benefit of large-scale U.S. farms is that because they are so efficient, economically and environmentally, they are also able to produce vastly more food than Americans can consume, making the country the world’s largest agricultural exporter as well. That benefits the U.S. economy, of course, but it also comes with an environmental benefit for the world. In the contemporary environmental imagination, highly productive, globally traded agriculture is a bad thing—poisoning the land at home and undermining food sovereignty abroad. But in reality, a pound of grain or beef exported from the United States almost always displaces a pound that would have been produced with more land and greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else. An accurate understanding of the benefits of the U.S. food system points toward a number of important opportunities to improve it. First, the United States should double down on technology and productivity. Better seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, feeds, and animal breeding—together with precision farming made possible by big data, GPS systems, and rural broadband—could significantly improve both the competitiveness and environmental performance of U.S. farms. We  that doubling federal support for agricultural research and development, from $4 billion annually to $8 billion, over the next decade would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture by an amount equivalent to about 40 percent of current U.S. cropland emissions while increasing U.S. exports. Second, liberalizing trade agreements can improve global food security, benefit U.S. agriculture, and bring substantial environmental benefits. Free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have historically been a target for environmentalists, who argue that they hurt poor farmers in developing countries while opening up U.S. markets to producers with lower labor and environmental standards. But overall, agricultural trade benefits the global poor and further liberalization  while . Further reducing trade barriers, particularly for goods with relatively low environmental footprints, would also concentrate production in places with an environmental comparative advantage. For instance, NAFTA mostly shifted Mexican and U.S. production toward crops that each country . Third, the United States should stop growing crops for biofuels and incentivize farmers to produce food for export markets. About  is diverted for production of biofuels, largely because the federal government mandates for ethanol use in gasoline. These policies might have made some sense in the 1970s, when oil was scarce and America’s petroleum reserves seemed to be on the wane. But today, the country is awash in oil, and the transition to electric vehicles is just getting started. Continuing to use some of the most highly productive farmland in the world to grow corn for biofuels also has terrible environmental costs. Under the best of circumstances, biofuels have a marginally lower carbon footprint than conventional petroleum-based fuels. But every bushel of corn that is used for fuel is also a bushel that isn’t used for food, which increases pressure to convert forests for farming somewhere else in the world. If President Joe Biden were to change just one thing about the U.S. food system to protect the environment, it would be to get rid of ethanol, not Twinkies.