In a broad sense regulation can be interpreted to include the enforcement of property rights and contracts, which are fundamental to effective markets. To go further and intervene in the market doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to me.

Furthermore, I can’t see any better resource allocation mechanisms on the horizon. I confess that I’m still very much in favour of markets with a benevolent dictator tinkering with the rules to increase efficiency. The problem is that the government doesn’t often look much like my vision of such a being 🙁

I suspect the problem will be solved by the market, regardless – if fossil fuel resource scarcity becomes acute fairly rapidly (I don’t know if it will, but it seems it might) and food prices go up, then we will get a strong signal to change agriculture… unfortunately not without hardship, but hey, that’s markets. Until we find out how to explicitly price in social and human well-being and ecosystem costs/benefits (not just through regulation), the market machinery will continue to maximise monetary gain over everything else.

I hear there are problems with farmers getting loans to finance next season’s planting, so maybe it’s not just a physical resource scarcity issue.

I think the problem with agriculture is the same problem that we’re having in many fields now: that resource constraints are starting to become apparent as the quantity of human consumption continues to increase. Unfortunately there’s no individual incentive to avoid hitting those constraints for farmers. It’s much like a prisoner’s dilemma in which we need some intervention to move us to the co-operative equilibrium.

Problems like that are why we started this blog: to discuss how appropriate government intervention can improve economic outcomes. As you say, some sort of regulation that internalises the waste of industrial farming would be a good start.

As to the “uses LOTS more resources” bit – well, duh! 🙂 Fossil-based fertilisers are highly concentrated, energy-wise, compared to horse/cow/sheep poop. So to get the equivalent productivity, you need more horses/cows/sheep, and these in turn need more land. Same logic applies to labour – dig weeds = more work than spray weeds.

How did you think this worked?

Roberts nails it though:
“Many of the familiar models don’t work well on the scale required to feed billions of people.”
and
“Until we can make the market see all the costs of unsustainable farming, and until we learn how to temper its obsessive focus on ever greater efficiencies, market-driven sustainability will fail.”
and
“After all, industrial food is cheap not only because of the efficiencies of scale and technologies, but also because the industrial system is so good at ignoring, or externalizing, costs such as ecological degradation or poor nutrition or underpaid labor.”

I’m not sure you captured the essence of his point in your summary above.

A question: Why did the rise of industrialised agriculture work so well – and why is it (and we) now at risk, in the long-term. After all, the big industrial farmers were just playing by the rules of the market, using available resources and technology (and driving the little family farms off the land and into the cities…). This is a strategy that only makes sense if you assume that the technologies and resources that facilitate industrial farming will always be available, or will always improve.

Which is like writing up a sub-prime liar loan and assuming the house price will always go up. And we know how that worked out.

I’m sorry I can’t comment directly on your question, but I think we can all see that such organic technology is unlikely to eventuate unless something radically changes the way we farm.

You don’t mention the resource constraints associated with the production of fossil fuel based synthetic fertilisers though? Perhaps you assume technological advances as a response to price, but then I would wonder how/if this applies to oraganics as well…