SEA News #8 Letters
Thanks for the information re SEA #7. I'm very interestred in the subject and would like to receive editions regularly. I think your articles and approach are very useful
Daniel Connell, Media Liaison, Murray-Darling Basin Commission
Thanks for another excellent newsletter. It is a valuable resource for me because of its relevance to that strange brew of agronomy, sociology and economics that is the real world.
I was a little concerned, however, with comments in you policy forum concerning the ethics of dryland salinity management. In particular, you say that "...the ethical responsibility for managing dryland salinity at the broad scale rests with governments (on behalf of the whole community) rather than with individual farmers". Here's some ideas that I have been mulling over ...
To me, it seems pointless to attribute responsibility in any direction. I think this reflects a fairly widely-held, but outdated, view of the role of government. Contemporary governments are charged with managing ecological standards. They don't seem to take responsibility or fix the problems (and why should they, unless they are causing them?). One analogy of the role of post-modern government is that it doesn't drive cars for people, but it installs traffic lights and sets maximum pollution levels for the benefits of all. How (and whether) you drive your car is up to you! Concerning salinity; it is not up to either farmers or governments to tell each other how to behave (would it work, anyway?). Instead, I think that each group and every individual needs to assess what they are doing and whether they can do better, given that we know there are plenty of problems with salinity.
Sorry for the long-winded response. Thanks again for the excellent newsletter.
Brett Robinson
Thanks for the positive comments. Your comments about government are interesting. Normally I find myself arguing that salinity is more of an individual problem than everyone seems to think, but your position is even further down that path. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't agree. Even your traffic light example is a case in support of my position, I'd say. We allow and encourage governments to put up traffic lights because as a group we agree that it is better for all of us to sacrifice the freedom to drive without stopping for anyone because if everybody does that, the roads are unusable. It's a classic case of a public good. Similarly, if there is any solution to salinity (and there probably isn't for some situations) it is one that will require a government to infringe (hopefully slightly) on the rights of some individuals for the greater public good. It's no different to speed limits, tax, rights to own property or any criminal law. The key is to only to intervene in circumstances and in ways that are genuinely in the public good. This is hard, and for salinity I'm sure we're getting this wrong as a society at present. It seems clear to me that there are ways that government could intervene in the public good for salinity, but these ways are different to the ways that they have actually been interevening.
I certainly don't want the government to drive cars for people. The equivalent would be to tell them how to manage their farms. One thing I do want is for government to facilititate the invention a new types of cars that will work better in our situation (i.e. develop profitable perennials). If farmers choose not to use them, fine. It probably reflects that we haven’t yet got the right sort of cars.
Dave Pannell
Just read your paper 2000/04 and was, again, impressed. Congratulations. The argument would be heartily supported by my landholder panels in the context of fencing riparian areas for biodiversity protection.
Neil MacLeod, CSIRO
I am not a trained economist, but have dabbled in farm forestry economics for a number of years now. Anyway have just read SEA News #5 and really impressed by the links between eco and socio-eco. Is it possible to be placed on the SEA News email list. Thanks and have already book marked SEA web site.
Peter Stephen, Department of Forestry, Institute of Land and Food, THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
Your comments on the ethics of salinity reinforce to me that voluntary action for natural resource management is unlikely, on its own, to be sufficient in either spatial scale or time. We will need to use carefully the full mix of market, regulatory and ethical forces. There are plenty of examples elsewhere in society where each of these has been used to great effect.
Keep up the stimulating work please!
Phil Price
I've just read your paper 'Ethics in dryland salinity ... .". I've got no problem with your point that communication strategies are nowhere sufficient by themselves, and the financial motivation to adopt must be addressed. However, I would argue that communication strategies still have a lot of longer-term potential that can, and must, be realised by learning how to design and implement them better. I guess I'm thinking mainly of collaborative or participative strategies. We need to recognise that such strategies are seeking informal cultural changes (i.e., changes in mindsets, preferences, and norms - within the bureaucratic and scientific millieu as well as amongst farmers) that typically happen slowly, sometimes only at the scale of generations. I believe that cultural change is necessary if the transaction and information costs of performing the research you recommend, and designing and implementing institutional changes to otherwise provide financial motivation, are to be eventually limited to a level that we collectively can afford.
I'm sure it's not your intention, but I'm concerned that your forcibly-put arguments might bolster a backlash against resourcing efforts to improve the design and implementation of collaborative strategies. It's not only your R&D foci that are under-resourced - the lack of discernable outcomes from collaborative processes is often because they are run 'on the cheap'. People with the experience and skills to successfully facilitate such processes are still rare, and expensive, but well worth it if we want results. Technical R&D won't succeed either unless it is performed by appropriately-skilled people. As modernists we tend to accept the latter as a matter of course, but remain ambivalent about the former. Technological innovation still has a lot to offer, to be sure, but I believe that the days of it being able to do the job alone, without help from efforts to effect cultural change, are well and truly behind us. We economists have been reluctant historically to endogenise cultural change in our models for environmental policy analysis, but this is changing, and it's about time.
Graham Marshall, University of New England
Thanks for these very reasonable comments. Here are some quick responses.
As a general rule, I have a strong sympathy for your desire for a change in values to enhance people's willingness to make sacrifices for the broader (and long term) public good. I think it has occurred to some extent, but not enough, and very slowly as you say. I think that the investment over the past decade in talking about Landcare with farmers has also had some benefits of this type. It's hard to know for sure, but I expect that a lot (if not most) of the environmentally oriented work done by farmers would not have happened without this. In my neck of the woods, the most tangible result has been the fencing off of large lengths of river banks, reducing bank erosion and movement of nutrients into the rivers. This is highly public spirited work (notwithstanding the public funding they have received to assist the work), and I have real admiration for the many farmers who have done it.
But I've come to believe that salinity is different to other environmental problems, certainly in WA, but almost certainly in other places as well. The basic reasons are
1. The external benefits of on-farm actions to prevent salinity are not nearly as great as has been widely presumed. I'm increasingly convinced that this applies widely, not only in WA.
2. For some situations that we have thought of as externality problems (e.g. protection of particular towns, roads, lakes, bush reserves), on-farm action would either not save them, or not be the cheapest way to save them. They often need on-site (off-farm) engineering works. Thus, sacrifices by farmers are irrelevant to these issues (apart from shouldering their share of the costs that are bourne by the whole community).
3. The direct net costs to farmers of implementing those on-farm actions to generate external benefits is extremely high.
In other words, given current technology, the degree of market failure due to salinity is minor. In low to medium rainfall regions, benefit:cost ratios for on farm treatments (including off farm benefits) are usually well below 1, and often as low as 0.5. Even if a benevolent (and well informed) dictator suddenly acquired all the land and managed it efficiently on behalf of us all, she wouldn't do much differently on farms than is happening now, at least with regard to salinity.
Thus, as a community, we have the following choices.
1. Behave inefficiently, spending more to prevent salinity than the value of the assets which are protected as a result.
2. Do nothing to prevent salinity coming. Put up with or repair the impacts of salinity. Develop uses for salty land and salty water. Use engineering measures to protect or repair public assets.
3. Try to change the available technologies for salinity prevention. We probably can't do very much to improve the effectiveness of existing technologies, but we can reduce their cost by developing practices that turn a profit for farmers.
Salinity policy makers have been more-or-less hoping that farmers would do (1) for us, and spending money to try to convince them to do so. They seem perplexed that farmers haven't responded. They shouldn't be. The sacrifices they are hoping for are just too great.
I think you're right about the need for cultural change within the salinity "system".
The situation for our farmers is not dissimilar to that in developing countries where resource protection takes a poor second place to short term production because farmers have their family's survival as top priority. The scale of action claimed by hydrologists to be necessary to prevent salinity is so vast as to place farmers in a similar situation to their developing-country counterparts. Changing farmers' values even more will no doubt achieve greater action in category (1), but my judgement is that there is not the slightest prospect of really making a difference to salinity by this method.
Number 2 is where we are heading by default, since relying on farmers to do 1 will not be effective.
Number 3 is being neglected. I'm not blind to the limits of technology, but I believe that for this particular example, it is our only hope to lessen the damage to agricultural land. It will not be straightforward, by any means, but the consequences of NOT investing in technology will be distressingly straightforward.
Dave Pannell
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