Agricultural policy


Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultural product markets. Well designed agricultural policies use predetermined goals, objectives and pathways set by an individual or government for the purpose of achieving a specified outcome, for the benefit of the individual, society and the nations' economy at large. The goals could include issues such as biosecurity, food security, rural poverty reduction or increasing economic value through cash crop or improved food distribution or food processing.
Agricultural policies take into consideration the primary, secondary and tertiary processes. Outcomes can involve, for example, a guaranteed supply level, price stability, product quality, product selection, land use or employment. Governments can use tools like rural development practices, agricultural extension, economic protections, agricultural subsidies or price controls to change the dynamics of agricultural production, or improve the consumer impacts of the production.
Agricultural policy has wide reaching primary and secondary effects. Agriculture has large impacts on climate change, with land use, land-use change, and forestry estimated to be contributing 13–21% of global annual emissions as of the 2010s. Moreover, agricultural policy needs to account for a lot of shocks to the system: for example, agriculture is highly vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, such as decreases in water access, geophysical processes such as ocean level rise and changing weather, and socioeconomic processes that affect farmers, many of whom are in subsistence economic conditions. In order for global climate change mitigation and adaptation to be effective a wide range of policies need to be implemented to reduce the risk of negative climate change impacts on agriculture and greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector.

Agriculture policy concerns

An example of the breadth and types of agriculture policy concerns can be found in the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics article "Agricultural Economies of Australia and New Zealand" which says that the major challenges and issues faced by their industrial agriculture industry are:
  • marketing challenges and consumer tastes
  • international trading environment
  • biosecurity
  • infrastructure
  • management skills and labor supply
  • coordination
  • technology
  • water
  • resource access issues

    Poverty reduction

working in poverty reduction in the agriculture sector assess, plan, or enact policies aimed to address the needs of persons living in poverty. Agriculture has been a critical driver of poverty reduction in most developing countries, particularly in rural areas. Approximately 80% of the world's impoverished population, who primarily reside in rural areas and earn their livelihood through farming, can benefit from agriculture in terms of poverty reduction, income generation, and food security. Fostering agricultural development is therefore a crucial element of agricultural policy in a developing country. In addition, a recent Natural Resource Perspective paper by the Overseas Development Institute found that good infrastructure, education and effective information services in rural areas were necessary to improve the chances of making agriculture work for the poor.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a disregard for the agriculture sector among policymakers and investors, only regaining interest when the prices of staple food crops experienced a significant increase in the mid-2000s. As a result of agricultural policy neglect, there has been a scarcity of investment in infrastructure, which has hindered agricultural development and public goods, such as education, research and development and technology. Rural productive sectors and small agricultural enterprises suffer from market failures due to policies favouring urban areas and lending policies biased against small-scale agricultural firms. Neglect in implementing agriculture policy has been detected in several developing countries. In Indonesia, since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the government's agricultural policy has been closely concentrated on achieving price stability and self-sufficiency for import-competing commodities, such as palm oil, sugar and rice.
International agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, espouse the prioritisation of agricultural endeavours to support poverty reduction. The impact of agricultural policy on reducing poverty differs across countries and is influenced by a variety of factors, such as the level of government policy support, the degree of public and private investment in agriculture, the different types of agriculture, and the growth rates of agriculture parallel to non-agriculture sectors. In particular, investment in agricultural research and development has been shown to be highly influential on agricultural GDP growth and poverty reduction. Government policies play a key role in promoting agricultural activities, such as irrigation systems, roads and telecommunication systems, land reform, power in rural areas, fiscal support for research and development, pricing policies, assistance for new technologies, and markets for agricultural produce. Agricultural policies have contributed to meeting the goals related to increasing, diversifying, and improving agricultural production.
Agricultural policies aimed at reducing poverty include India's Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, which offers crop insurance to farmers to protect them from weather-related uncertainties and potential crop failures. This initiative provides farmers with financial aid for crop loss, reducing the risk of falling into poverty. Rwanda's Crop Intensification Program is another example of such policy, which provides farmers with inputs like fertilisers, improved seeds, and pesticides, as well as training and technical support to help them adopt more efficient farming practices. However, for agricultural policies to contribute to poverty reduction, it is essential that they collaborate effectively and cohesively with other sectors, such as tourism, sustainable economy, and industry.

Biosecurity

The biosecurity concerns facing industrial agriculture can be illustrated by:
  • the threat to poultry and humans from H5N1; possibly caused by the use of animal vaccines
  • the threat to cattle and humans from bovine spongiform encephalopathy ; possibly caused by the unnatural feeding of cattle to cattle to minimize costs
  • the threat to industry profits from diseases like foot-and-mouth disease and citrus canker which increasing globalization makes harder to contain

    Avian influenza

The use of animal vaccines can create new viruses that kill people and cause flu pandemic threats. H5N1 is an example of where this might have already occurred. According to the CDC article "H5N1 Outbreaks and Enzootic Influenza" by Robert G. Webster et al.: "Transmission of highly pathogenic H5N1 from domestic poultry back to migratory waterfowl in western China has increased the geographic spread. The spread of H5N1 and its likely reintroduction to domestic poultry increase the need for good agricultural vaccines. In fact, the root cause of the continuing H5N1 pandemic threat may be the way the pathogenicity of H5N1 viruses is masked by co-circulating influenza viruses or bad agricultural vaccines." Robert Webster explains: "If you use a good vaccine you can prevent the transmission within poultry and to humans. But if they have been using vaccines now for several years, why is there so much bird flu? There is bad vaccine that stops the disease in the bird but the bird goes on pooping out the virus and maintaining it and changing it. And I think this is what is going on in China. It has to be. Either there is not enough vaccine being used or there is substandard vaccine being used. Probably both. It's not just China. We can't blame China for substandard vaccines. I think there are substandard vaccines for influenza in poultry all over the world."
In response to the same concerns, Reuters reports Hong Kong infectious disease expert Lo Wing-lok indicating that vaccines have to take top priority. Julie Hall, who is in charge of the WHO's outbreak response in China, claimed that China's vaccinations might be masking the virus. The BBC reported that Wendy Barclay, a virologist at the University of Reading, UK said: "The Chinese have made a vaccine based on reverse genetics made with H5N1 antigens, and they have been using it. There has been a lot of criticism of what they have done because they have protected their chickens against death from this virus but the chickens still get infected, and then you get the drift - the virus mutates in response to the antibodies - and now we have a situation where we have five or six 'flavours' of H5N1 out there."

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as "mad cow disease", is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease of cattle, which infects by a mechanism that surprised biologists upon its discovery in the late 20th century. In the UK, the country worst affected, 179,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million were killed as a precaution. The disease can be transmitted to human beings who eat or inhale material from infected carcasses. In humans, it is known as new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, and by June 2007, it had killed 165 people in Britain, and six elsewhere with the number expected to rise because of the disease's long incubation period. Between 460,000 and 482,000 BSE-infected animals had entered the human food chain before controls on high-risk offal were introduced in 1989.
A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by feeding cattle, who are normally herbivores, the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal, which caused the infectious agent to spread., Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, March 2007. The origin of the disease itself remains unknown. The current scientific view is that infectious proteins called prions developed through spontaneous mutation, probably in the 1970s, and there is a possibility that the use of organophosphorus pesticides increased the susceptibility of cattle to the disease. The infectious agent is distinctive for the high temperatures it is able to survive; this contributed to the spread of the disease in Britain, which had reduced the temperatures used during its rendering process. Another contributory factor was the feeding of infected protein supplements to very young calves instead of milk from their mothers.