The agribusiness way to harvest wheat. Changes in the food system have brought considerable cost to the environment and human health. Such problems have been widely documented over recent decades, but it is only recently that efforts to put a monetary cost on them have begun to emerge. These costs are telling us something fundamentally important about the real costs of modern food and farming.
Many farmers depend upon public finance to survive.
It has taken fifty years of subsidies for farming to get to this point. It's hardly surprising that policies tend to support one particular method of farming - one that relies upon modern technologies to produce food. At the University of Essex, we recently completed the first national study of the environmental and health impacts of modern farming. These costs are not part of the prices paid by producers or consumers. And when such externalities are not included in prices, they distort the market.