The end of agriculture
Matt Ridley
National Post
Paul Lachine
The illustration shows a farmer with a pitch fork. On the end of the pitch fork is paper money.
NEWCASTLE, Eng. - By the end of last week, the number of cattle, sheep and pigs slaughtered in the current foot-and-mouth outbreak in Britain had already exceeded, in just a month, the total number over 10 years of cattle that caught bovine spongiform encephalitis, the previous scourge to affect British livestock.
The two diseases are very different. Foot-and-mouth is a highly contagious but short-lived disease that is only sometimes fatal. Human beings very rarely catch the virus and quickly recover if they do. BSE is difficult to contract, very slow acting and fatal to both cattle and to the 90 or so people who have so far caught it by eating infected tissue. Yet although BSE caused terror, scandal and anguish for many years in Britain, it never had the effect that the foot-and-mouth epidemic has already had on the economy. This is because its effects remained confined to agriculture and the food industry. Foot-and-mouth, by closing down the entire countryside, threatens to devastate businesses that have little or nothing to do with farming.
As the epidemic took off, controls on activities in the countryside tightened. Parks, footpaths and gardens are closed. Hunting and fishing have been cancelled. Fairs and gatherings are postponed. Hotels and pubs are empty. The vast rural tourism industry has simply ceased to exist for the time being. The tourism industry is said to be losing US$150-million a week.
At first, this was accepted as necessary by country dwellers and town people. It was novel and perhaps even exciting in the way crises can be. The dreadful misery of farm families, trapped in quarantine in their homes as they watched their animals slaughtered, was moving enough for most Britons to accept their own, lesser sacrifices.
But resistance has gradually grown. Horse-racing ceased but then recommenced. The improving spring weather brought people out to walk their dogs, and the economic impact on the tourism industry led commentators to ask awkward questions. Should the far larger tourism industry really be destroyed for the sake of the comparatively small farm sector? Why not just let the disease run its course?
This was probably the last time farming could get the government to shut down the countryside for its sake. Next time foot-and-mouth comes, the economic weight of the farmers will be too small. Tourism, riding, walking, golf and fishing will be more valuable to country dwellers. The virus will have to run its course without quarantine. Let us hope by then that a truly effective vaccine is available.
Even this epidemic will hasten the decline of British agriculture. Few of those who have watched their favorite animals turned to smoke will have the heart, let alone the money, to start all over again. The compensation they are receiving will be used to pay off the bank; the machinery will be sold and the job market will beckon.
Already many farmers' sons have left for easier and better-paid jobs elsewhere. Thousands of farm labourers have been laid off in the current agricultural depression. The steady and remorseless decline in agricultural prices since the 1960s accelerated in the late 1990s with the slump in commodity prices.
But what will happen to the land? In recent decades, all across the globe, Malthus has never been more wrong: Population is growing more slowly than food supply. This means that, somewhere in the world, marginal land will start to come out of cultivation. Soon Eastern Europe will get its agricultural act together. Soon Africa will grab its share of the green revolution and harness the benefits of fertilizer, pesticides and plant breeding (not to mention genetic modification). At that point, countries with economically marginal farmland will have to find other uses for the land.
It happened in New England a century ago. Farms were abandoned and reverted to forest as their owners moved west to exploit the prairies. Today, these New England woods have far more value as private wood lots, or conservation easements, than they would ever have again as farmland. The same is happening in Britain. Much of the Scottish highlands is now valued more for its deer than for its sheep. Many suburban farms make more money from horse-riding than they could from wheat. In parts of Devon, pheasant shooting is more profitable than raising cattle.
However, this is a process that has been delayed in Britain and much of Europe by an economic quirk. Farmers pay for their land, either in rent or by purchasing the freehold. Ramblers, who use public footpaths and access to open moorland, do not pay. Nor do fox hunters. They therefore place no economic value on the asset they use, and there is no incentive for anybody to invest in creating more of it.
Britain therefore has a shortage of privately provided footpaths, nature parks and recreation areas, just as it has a shortage of teachers and doctors -- items that also are provided for free. Instead, walkers have to demand more access to the countryside by menaces from the government rather than by putting their money where their mouths are.
For nature conservation, all this is good news. If agricultural yields were the same as they were 40 years ago, to produce the same amount of food would require double the acreage under cultivation. The deserts, forests, hills and swamps so beloved of naturalists would have vanished beneath the plough.
In a few decades' time, when population growth has slowed to zero, irrigated, hydroponic, genetically modified agriculture may be able to supply the world with an ample food supply from a much smaller acreage than today. In theory, the rest could be filled with parks, recreation areas or just wilderness. In practice, it is hard to foresee how these can fill the entire landscape as farming did.
So what is happening in Britain, accelerated by foot-and-mouth, will be happening across the world on less productive soils. For the first time in 5,000 years, agriculture will begin a slow retreat from the countryside. How the land will then be used, and who will pay for those new uses, are questions that nobody can yet answer.
Matt Ridley is the author of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (HarperCollins 2000). Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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