Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

Thompson, Paul B.

English

Research Papers in Economics

Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 29, l(July 1997):73–75
0 1997 SouthernAgricultural Economics Association
Sustaining Animal Agriculture and
Environmental Quality in the South:
What Happened and Why? Discussion
Paul B. Thompson
German social theorist Ulrich Beck has sug-
gested that the political economy of post-in-
dustrial society has shifted away from the
competition among relatively well-defined so-
cial groups for control of benefit streams re-
sulting from technological and organizational
innovations that characterized the roughly
200-year period of industrialization. In its
place, we find constantly changing aggregates
of individuals engaged in temporary or limited
alliances competing to affect the distribution
of social, environmental, and economic risks.
Beck argues that a complex set of forces has
brought about this shift. He mentions many oft
noted changes in gender and family roles, in
employment patterns, and global interdepen-
dencies, but two points are especially relevant
to the collection of issues that have been dis-
cussed in these four papers.
First is Beck’s claim that a public educated
from childhood in the sciences has developed
a much more sophisticated (and much more
skeptical) understanding of the certainty with
which the future can be anticipated. People no
longer believe that science, government, or pa-
triarchy can either assure future benefits or an-
ticipate the source and magnitude of potential
threats. Second is a general recognition of the
fact that technological change is not inherently
progressive. Not only are there winners and
losers from technical change, but most of us
both win and lose in the wake of technical
The author is a professor of agricultural economics and
director of the Center for Science and Technology Pol-
icy and Ethics, Texas A&M University.
change, and in ways that are difficult to antic-
ipate in advance, difficult to reverse, and dif-
ficult even to sort out in retrospect so that it
could be said definitively that one won or lost.
Beck believes that these changes have contrib-
uted to a widely shared shift in mentality:
those who once would have evaluated political
change in light of its effect on their ability to
attain social positions presumed to guarantee
a lifelong stream of benefits now evaluate both
technical and political change in light of their
potential to simultaneously affect the likeli-
hood and the burden of responsibility for po-
tential hazards and unwanted events. Beck ar-
gues that this shift has not only politicized
technical change, but has also altered the pol-
icy process for promoting or regulating tech-
nical change in fundamental ways.
This is not the place to undertake an as-
sessment of Beck’s social theory. Clearly,
some of his observations amount to little more
than a shift in language-expectations de-
scribed in terms of risk rather than benefit.
What is useful here is to consider how the pol-
icy and political environment for animal ag-
riculture may reflect a shift of the sort that
Beck notes. The papers presented by Martin
and Zering, and by Outlaw, Anderson, and
Padberg document how southern animal pro-
ducers as well as state and local political econ-
omies are being affected by changes charac-
teristic of industrialization. Technical changes
are being fueled by efficiencies of scale or by
market opportunities, and these changes have
precipitated political conflicts typical of indus-
trialization: traditional farmers compete with74 Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, July 1997
better capitalized industrializers or with pro-
cessors for policies that will ensure future ben-
efit streams. Yet both of these papers note the
way in which these battles are affected by a
post-industrial policy environment.
Outlaw, Anderson, and Padberg explain
why the public’s interest in environmental
risks of beef production is unlikely to be ac-
commodated as long as it is articulated as a
demand for new benefit streams in the form
of environmental amenities. Martin and Zering
emphasize how industrialization changes the
character of environmental risks. One change
is a new potential for catastrophic losses. Risk
studies have shown that the public is more tol-
erant of risks associated with many small-scale
events, dispersed over time and space, than of
single events having high consequences, even
when the expected utility associated with the
catastrophic risk is comparable to or even low-
er than the aggregated expected utility of
many distinct events (Thompson and Parkin-
son). A second change is that industrialized
firms themselves become motivated by a de-
sire to shed liability risks, and this can lead
them both to technological innovations and to
support for regulatory policies that redistribute
risks to the public sector (Aharoni).
The papers by Abdalla and Shaffer, and by
Thurow and Holt address issues in political
economy even more directly. Abdalla and
Shaffer argue that across the nation, jurisdic-
tional boundary choices are becoming the
dominant factors affecting the future of animal
agriculture. As they see it, producers of all
sizes compete with each other and with local
citizen and environmental groups to ensure
that favorable polices are in place. Abdalla
and Shaffer contend that we must no longer
see this competition as an attempt to influence
the choice of policy makers in a given federal,
state, or local agency, but as a strategic game
of pairing a particular interest group’s political
strengths (determined by such things as scale,
responsiveness, or homogeneity) with a partic-
ular agency or branch of government, and then
pitting these opponents against one another in
a contest to see which agency—state or local,
Department of Agriculture or Department of
Natural Resources, the legislature or the
courts—will win in the protracted struggle to
control the dominant police power in a re-
spective locality. These battles are being set-
tled rather differently from state to state, and
we may be in for a new round of competition
among states based on the vastly different in-
stitutional structures that are currently evolv-
ing.
The picture that Abdalla and Shaffer de-
scribe is, in most respects, consistent with the
way that Jefferson, Madison, and others
thought that a republic of democratically con-
trolled states would work. However, Abdalla
and Shaffer caution that local citizen concerns
are often inchoate and poorly articulated,
while organized interests will tend to prevail
in state regulatory agencies. If there is a flaw
in the picture that Abdalla and Shaffer paint,
it is their emphasis on preference articulation
as the key measure of citizen concern. The
notion that preference satisfaction (whether
through markets or politics) is the sine qua
non of individual choice derives from an ap-
proach to welfare economics that was very
much the stepchild of industrialization. This
tends to make Abdalla and Shaffer frame po-
litical competition too much in the industrial
mode of a battle over future benefit streams,
rather than as a strategic game of risk man-
agement. If Beck is right, interest groups and
political leaders who continue to think of the
political arena in these terms will be increas-
ingly surprised, confused, and frustrated by
the influence, resiliency, and agenda of risk
politics.
The cases discussed by Thurow and Hoh
bring this message home in a powerful way.
In Okeechobee County, Florida, some of the
earliest lessons were learned about how envi-
ronmental, economic, and political risks are
redistributed through centralized decision
making. I interpret the support for ex ante pol-
icy assessment as an explicit call for risk-
based policy, and the difficulties of obtaining
data and eliminating uncertainty as a reflection
of the sophistication both producers and others
have in understanding the strategic dimensions
of a risk-based policy process. The Texas case
is a clear illustration of the way that environ-
mental, economic, and political risks are dis-Thompson: Sustaining Animal Agriculture: Discussion 75
tributed not only across social strata, but
across space and time, shifting in degree and
character as dynamic processes of economic
investment and policy innovation interact,
leaving an apparently win-win comporting
technology without political support. In both
Florida and Texas, risk politics have already
made the conventional assumptions of indus-
trial political economy obsolete.
In closing, I would note only that southern
animal agriculture is undergoing a process of
industrialization, and as such, the standard de-
vices from a social science tool kit-refined
during an age of industrial politics and market
transactions—still apply. When called on to
evaluate the impact of industrialization on ru-
ral communities, economists have been quick
to estimate the value of agricultural production
to community income streams, and to describe
distributive patterns along small versus large
farm, or farm versus nonfarm lines. That ap-
proach might have been entirely adequate in a
world of pure industrial politics. However, if
Beck is even partly right, these tools will be-
come increasingly inadequate as competition
over policy goals comes to reflect the disag-
gregate, temporary, and contingent concerns
of the risk society. If agricultural economists
hope to advise policy makers and their tradi-
tional constituency in the future, they will
need to reframe information on income and
distribution so that it is relevant to risk poli-
tics, and will need to augment their traditional
advice with a more sophisticated accounting
of the extent and distribution of environmental
and social risk.
References
Aharoni, Y. The No-Risk Society. Chatham NJ:
Chatham House Publishers, 1981.
Beck, U. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity,
trans. by M. Ritter. Newberry Park CA: Sage
Publications, 1992.
Thompson, I?B., and W.J. Parkinson. “Situation-
Specific Indicators for Distinguishing Between
High-Consequence/Low-Probability Risk and
Low-Consequence/High-Probability Risk.” In
Low-Probability/High- Consequence Risk Anal-
ysis: Issues, Methods, and Case Studies, eds.,
R.A. Wailer and V.T Covello, pp. 55 1–68. New
York: Plenum Press, 1984.

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. by

SituationSpecific Indicators for Distinguishing Between High-Consequence/Low-Probability Risk and Low-Consequence/High-Probability Risk.” In Low-Probability/High- Consequence Risk Analysis: Issues, Methods,

SUSTAINING ANIMAL AGRICULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY IN THE SOUTH: WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY? DISCUSSION

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