Economic Institutions for Sustainable, Just and Efficient Food System

Joshua FarleyCommunity Development and Applied

EconomicsGund Institute for Ecological Economics

University of Vermont

Sustainability

• Dependence on non-renewables

• Need to feed growing population

Irreconcilable Tradeoffs

Justice

• Current distribution of wealth and income in historical perspective

• 2007 food crisis and access to food• Impacts of climate change on food production• Just deserts, procedural justice, just outcomes

Efficiency

• What is efficiency?– Food per acre?– Food per unit labor?– Monetary value per acre?– How do we maximize monetary value– Where does time come into this?

• Thermodynamic efficiency• What is the goal of a food system?

Solutions 1: New ag. technologies

• New agricultural technologies– Eliminate use of non-renewables– Protect and restore ecosystem services– Maintain or increase food production– Increase resilience against climate shocks

New ag tech.

• Will markets promote and disseminate?– Treat non-renewable resources as property of this generation

• prices do not reflect demand of future generations• How much would Mona Lisa sell for if auctioned off in Waco, Texas?

– Fail to value, produce or protect resources (goods and bads) that can’t be privately owned• Most ecosystem services, including biodiversity loss, nitrogen

pollution, GHG emissions

– Use price mechanism to ration access to technologies. More environmentally friendly technologies would therefore be underutilized• Value of information maximized at price of zero.

Solutions 2: Economic Institutions

• Production and dissemination of new technologies

• Allocation of Food

R&D

• R&D should be publicly funded, open access. Universal consortium– Markets do not fund R&D that benefit the poor, that

are easy to copy, or that protect and restore non-marketed goods and services

– Higher returns on public sector investments• Small scale– Require more direct knowledge of land and ecosystem;

won’t have cheap energy for large scale systems• R&D should be done in collaboration with farmer

Extension and Adoption

• Extension should be publicly funded– Must facilitate the transfer and adoption of knowledge. Pilot

farms, tec. • Low risk credit

– Farmers cannot be expected to make necessary investments on their own, or risk having to repay loans if projects fail

• Revenue should be provided by beneficiaries of ecosystem services– ES are public goods, this means in general public sector

provision– In some cases, cost savings can be invested, e.g. lower

municipal water costs, flood damages, public health costs, etc.

Allocation

• Price rationing/markets requires much greater equality

• Alternative forms of rationing? – Easier at national than at global level– Tiered pricing: basic needs cheap– Brazil-California example

• May apply to all essential, non-substitutable resources