GREEN PAYMENTS AS FORESHADOWED BY EQIP

This paper addresses the potential of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to become the first true green payment program, one which is not directly linked to farm income goals as all conservation programs have been in the past, even in contrast to the Conservation Reserve Program and the now obsolete Agricultural Conservation Program. EQIP is thus discussed as a new generation of conservation programs which are General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-legal (no payments to farmers which may influence trade) and more targeted to actual agro-environmental problems than the traditional conservation programs. In the next sections, the paper raises two important questions: First, to what extent should green payments substitute for traditional commodity payments, as they are being phased out? If taking water quality problems into account, EQIP does not reach the geographic areas of the highest commodity program payments, although substitution was never intended and has inherent problems. The paper then looks at EQIP as a green payment program, discussing to what extent EQIP reflects the desired characteristics of a GATT-legal green payment program. Three such characteristics are discussed as hurdles for a successful EQIP implementation: a program has to be targeted, tailored and transparent. Additionally, rent-seeking by various private interests, lack of science-based data, agency and farmer inertia and the complexity of the program are all challenges which must be faced. The study concludes with a discussion of the future of green payments.Environmental Economics and Policy,

DISCUSSION: LOCATION DETERMINANTS OF MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY IN RURAL AREAS

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The Multifunctional Attributes of Northeastern Agriculture: A Research Agenda

In the United States' Northeastern region, there is an increasing interest in the public benefits from agriculture. These benefits are frequently referred to as multifunctional attributes. The policy challenge is to find an effective way to reflect these public demands so that multifunctional agriculture can be profitable. There is a significant research agenda that accompanies this challenge. Research topics include assessing and understanding consumer demand for multifunctional attributes, estimating the long-run returns to those production systems which supply these attributes, and designing and evaluating institutional arrangements to supply them.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

The Demand for Economic Policy Analysis: Is Anyone Listening?

Agricultural and Food Policy,

THE NEW ERA OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE: UNCERTAINTIES AND CONSTRAINTS

Agricultural and Food Policy,

AGRICULTURE AS THE PROBLEM: NEW AGENDAS AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Agribusiness,

EMERGING RURAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Environmental Economics and Policy,

Mitigating Damages From Coastal Wetlands Development: Policy, Economics and Financing

This paper looks at the problem of modeling the welfare consequences of the effects of environmental changes on the bioeconomic equilibrium of fisheries. The equilibrium catch equation is suggested as the most appropriate mechanism for modelling these effects. Several different models are presented, based on the availability of data. It is shown that a model in which the equilibrium catch function is estimated directly as a function of environmental quality will be superior to a model which takes the stock effects from an independent ecosystem model. Models are also suggested for those cases in which only proxies for stock levels are available, and for those cases in which no stock data are available.Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Public Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty,

TOWARD AGRICULTURAL ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: APPLYING LESSONS FROM CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Many business firms both in the U.S. and abroad are practicing corporate environmental management. They are committed to improving the efficiency of material use, energy use and water use; to recycle; to make safer products and processes and to reduce their overall impact on the environment. In pursuing corporate environmental management, some businesses have found that the presumed tradeoff between profits and environmental quality does not always apply. Instead, by innovating and redesigning their products, processes, corporate culture, and organizational strategy, these firms have been able to improve environmental performance and add to profits. These improved profits are sometimes referred to as "innovation offsets" because they result from technological changes to reduce pollution which also reduce production costs (and/or improve productivity) and thereby "offset" the costs of compliance. The necessary technological innovation is pursued when firms take a dynamic investment perspective rather than presume a static tradeoff between profits and environmental quality.Environmental Economics and Policy,

INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES AND STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: VIEW FROM WITHIN THE LAND-GRANT UNIVERSITY

Sustainable agricultural research and education have gained acceptability within the land-grant system in less than a decade, an impressive change. Attitudes were changed by a set of forces which include lobbying by sustainable agriculture advocates, requests from farmers as a result of the cost-price squeeze of the early 1980's, changing demands for both environmental quality and less pesticide residues from food consumers, and the availability of new funding sources. Despite its hard-won acceptability, there are tensions with respect to sustainable agriculture within the land-grant system. Sustainable agricultural issues are not yet integrated into the fabric of the land-grant institution. In order to integrate it fully, challenges remain in three key areas: knowledge generation, research and education, and funding. The challenge to generate new knowledge embraces not only biological and ecological systems, but also the socioeconomic systems of the humans who manage agriculture. We must move beyond anecdotal evidence of biological integration efficiencies to scientific understanding of the underlying processes and opportunities for human intervention. The biological research agenda covers a plethora of plant-animal-environment interactions from the microbial level on upward. Socioeconomic research must grapple with human motivations to change farming methods, as well as the likely impacts of change on farmers, consumers, other species, and the quality of the environment in which we live. One important area for such knowledge-generation is the relative merits of government policy tools, which have been and will continue to be central to environmental quality assurance. Attempts to generate new sustainable agriculture knowledge have already begun to raise new challenges for the integration of research and education. Research trials conducted off the research station pose new quandaries for scientific analysis and validation. Having farmers set the research and outreach agenda can be threatening to land-grant personnel as the old distinction between research and extension begins to dissolve. This situation is complicated by the budgetary stress on land-grant institutions and uncertainty about the dividing line between public and private responsibilities in a rapidly changing agricultural business environment. Funding is the third area where more integration into the land-grant university is needed. Earmarked funding for sustainable agriculture has helped to legitimize it in the land-grant university. But earmarked funding is a two-edged sword. If sustainable agriculture fails to become integrated into the routine land-grant agenda for research and education, it will lose its newly gained momentum if those funds disappear. It needs to gain full acceptance as legitimate science that will allow its researchers to compete for "mainline" funding sources such as the USDA National Research Initiative grants. Sustainable agriculture has made strong gains within the land-grant university system. But it can easily slip from the land-grant agenda or become co-opted if sustainable agriculture research and education are not integrated further into the system while retaining a clear focus on its original goals.Environmental Economics and Policy,