ABSTRACT
It is currently financially more advantageous to damage the environment, exploit resources, and harm the health of people, than it is to protect and enhance our natural resources and strive for good health and well-being in society. Similarly, in our agriculture and food systems, the majority of policies neither incentivize the generation of public goods, nor disincentivize harmful practices. As a result, farmers and food businesses do not sufficiently consider “external” effects in their decision-making.
True Cost Accounting (TCA) can create a level playing field for sustainable farming and agricultural production systems such as agroecological, organic practices. Using TCA, we demonstrate that organic agriculture generates added value for the public good and that it can reduce the costs caused by the unsustainable production practices of “conventional” agriculture. In other words, an expansion of organic agriculture and agroecology makes sense both for people and the planet.
Public financial support should be earmarked to activities that ensure the production of a variety of socioeconomic and environmental benefits, such as healthy ecosystems, healthy produce for healthy people, and sustainable livelihoods for all who work in food systems. Political and economic support for organic agriculture can serve to ensure the production of a variety of public goods that tend not to be produced by non-sustainable agriculture and are not sufficiently remunerated by the market.
This chapter provides examples of policies that use TCA implicitly or explicitly to push agriculture towards more sustainability, thereby rewarding farmers for contributing to public goods.
