The business world sets its goals and its practices around one simple idea, reducing costs, in turn, increasing profits and revenue. And because our current agriculture system abides by the business world standards, it seeks to minimize its costs as much as possible. Reducing costs come from methods such as hiring immigrants for labor and paying them less then minimum wage, or the growth of monocultures which require less energy and resources, or the use of GMO organisms to ensure plentiful yield. All these methods reduce the cost of large agriculture business and allow them to accumulate large quantities of capital; however, the agriculture sector practices no method more blatant and destructive then the act of externalizing costs. Externalizing costs come in the form of environmental degradation, unintended health consequences, and the list goes on. Essentially an externalized cost is an unintended (or intended) cost that the business does not incorporate into their cost/benefits analysis, and the public or environment ends up paying for the cost of damages.
No Act is more transparent in it’s support of externalizing the costs of Big Ag, than the exclusions included the CWA enforced by the EPA and USDA. According to Darren Bask,
“Section 404(f)(1)(A) of the Clean Water Act (the “normal farming” exemption), dredge-and-fill permits are not required when the discharge into a covered water is “from normal farming, silviculture, and ranching activities such as plowing, seeding, cultivating, minor drainage, harvesting for the production of food, fiber, and forest products, or upland soil and water conservation practices”.
The exemptions are worded so broadly that any farm can be interpreted to fit the “normal farming” description. This means that any large industrialized farm with heavily fertilized soil and intensive practice of pesticide use, both in which cause harm to the health of humans and the environment, do not have to comply with the CWA. This exemption allows Big Ag to continuously use its exhaustive farming practices, which currently erodes the soils, poisons the land and depletes water sources. The fact that Big Ag does not have to pay for the environmental degradation caused by intensive farming practices, allows them to produce food more cheaply and in turn make prices lower.
Although food prices might look low, it’s important to realize the true costs of industrialized farm practices. Figuring out the true externalized cost of environmental degradation can be difficult to determine. Much of these costs are not seen immediately, as environmental degradation usually affects the productivity and livelihood of future generations, which allows Big Ag to slip by its future costs imposed on cohorts down the line. The complexity of relationships and systems, both, within organisms and the environment, creates issues with determining the cost of environmental degradation. This uncertainty of true environmental costs is in implicit in the small fines given to Big Ag for breaking environmental regulations.
It is important we hold Big Ag accountable for it’s destructive practices; by making them internalize all the externalized costs they impose on the environment and society. This can only be accomplished if we reconstruct our policy of the CWA; including agriculture as a point source and increasing regulation in pollution of run-off, makes Big Ag responsible for it’s true costs. People opposed to this change in policy argue, that it would be very costly to make a whole infrastructure accountable for its pollution, and that public would end up bearing these costs. I argue that the public already bears the costs of these environmental impact, and that its time for Big Ag to pay up.