I wonder if the UK government would forbid petrol stations from placing those on their pumps. I can’t imagine it would inspire too much joy in the average citizen to see that 25p per liter was the actual cost of the fuel, and the other 75p were taxes on the fuel.

2 main phenomena are of note, and appear to cause massive confusion, Paul notably.

Firstly soil erosion. This is largely a result of overexploitation and poor husbandry leading to direct loss of the topsoil by the action of wind and water. In the 1st world it is not a significant problem and according to Bjorn Lomborg will amount to around 3% of soil in the next hundred years, easily offset by future productivity increases. For the 3rd world some development would enable them, like us, to prevent erosion and further food production.

Secondly, what people here are referring too is actually long term loss of organic matter. This is the decaying plant material that makes up the “fourth constituent” of soil after sand, silt and clay. It disappears under aerobic conditions, being converted to soluble nitrogen which is taken up by plants, or lost in soil water; and gaseous compounds, lost to the air. In waterlogged soils with anaerobic conditions this matter will accumulate as peat. Drainage therefore increases organic matter loss – the Fens have lost up to 5 metres height in some areas from this.

Lack of soil organic matter does not directly influence yield. Artificial nitrogen, phosphate and potash can be applied at a cost. It can be a problem in the poorest soils which lack enough clay to prevent erosion, but such soils are unproductive anyway and are better off growing grass or pine trees.

It has nonetheless been portrayed by alarmists as a problem. Specialisation in agriculture has led to wall to wall wheat crops replacing traditional mixed livestock and crop farming, meaning animal manures are no longer available to maintain organic matter in such soils. But it is not a real problem. If it were then farmers would have to spend money on compost, or grow crops such as maize, potatoes and sugar beet that add more organic matter. So, organic propaganda debunked.

Moving on to crop protection. First a correction in terminology: pesticides are the collective name for 3 main groups of plant protection products, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.

Certain crop protection active ingredients are in the process of being withdrawn, and this project has been ongoing for about 5 years now. The EU increased costs for chemical manufacturers to comply with and pay for their complex licensing procedures. Some products thus became uneconomic and were withdrawn.

I don’t know why the present batch are being removed and if so whether there will be any real drawback. I am no longer a farmer; I sold up and am thinking of going to Colorado to join a mythical hidden community that uses gold coins for money instead.

Lomborg notes that a study on a complete ban on pesticides estimates a social cost of 23 – 74 billion USD per year, or 1 billion per cancer deaths saved at present rates. 300 Americans die in their own bathtubs every year. Cancer from pesticide risk is negligible- 60 times less than 3 cups of coffee or one gram of basil per day. Worse, it is estimated there would be 26,000 surplus cancer deaths every year from people eating less fruit and vegetables because “Carrots just got a lot more expensive.” And all that just for the US!

So environmentalist propaganda debunked. Great aren’t they, facts? Only don’t expect any from the fact-dodging statists.

In contrast we create government in part to deal with issues that are sufficiently large and complex that we can’t adequately quantify them, yet we know they require action.

That in a nutshell is what the late F.A. Hayek meant by the “fatal conceit” of socialism, and indeed of central planning generally. You are basically saying that because certain issues are complex that only governments can “deal with” them.

I would stand that point the other way around: it is precisely because issues like pollution are complex that an approach that works with the grain of a system of dispersed property ownership, consumer freedom and flexible legal codes is the way to go. You are trying for a one-size-fits all approach. Who are you – or I – to impose a cost-benefit analysis on our fellows in this way? To be blunt – and I have been polite so far – your approach reeks of nannying.

These issues involve trade-offs: trade-offs between less usage of supposedly damaging chemicals versus food production; the risks of chemical pollution versus lack of fresh vegetables, and so on. These are not black and white issues; they involve compromise. The trouble with the sort of approach you take is that there are folk in government that are supposedly smart enough to take a stand on these trade-offs and get those right. That’s nonsense. The temptation for governments will be the “precautionary one”: avoid mistakes, prevent scandals. That way lies stagnation. The Industrial Revolution would have been strangled at birth.

After all, Johnathon has suggested that the average carrot consumer can develop an understanding of pesticides I’d expect to see in an undergrad in chemistry or medicine, plus an appreciation of risk and ecology at similar levels.

No. What I am saying is that if supermarkets or other retailers of products want to label them for marketing reasons, fine. Many will because it makes economic sense for them to do so. You seem to be taking the rather paternalistic view that ordinary Joe Public is frankly too thick or lazy to figure out these issues and should let all that stuff be handled by scientists. The problem is that what happens is that high costs are lumped onto the consumer and there is very little information provided about why. And in fact we have seen in recent years, due to marketing strategies by firms, a lot of effort made in informing consumers about how the stuff they buy is made. It is not perfect but in fact a lot of data is provided. Sure, a lot of crap as well but that’s what happens in a free market.

anyway, as I said, the track record of governments banning certain chemicals is poor. The case of DDT, and the subsequent re-emergence of malaria as a major killer, is a case in point.

is that increasingly soil *doesn’t* grow stuff, it provides a medium for holding a plant upright while chemicals grow stuff.

That simply isn’t true; or rather it isn’t a meaningful statement.

The three primary requirements for plants are sunlight, carbon dioxide (from the atmosphere) and water. After that, a plant needs some other elements such as nitrogen, down to traces of molybdenum. It gets these from the soil. These chemicals are the same however they get into the soil; a nitrate is a nitrate. If the soil is depleted in some chemical, you can buy a bag of it and add some more.

You’re creating an artifical distinction between “natural” and “unnatural”. A nitrate that happens to be there in the environment by accident is just a chemical, the same as the nitrate from a baggie. Farmers *modify* the chemical constitution of their soil to maximally benefit the plants they grow there. Soil, the most untouched soil in the world, is just a bunch of chemicals mixed up. That’s all it is. You can rotate crops to fix nitrogen (as nitrates) in the soil, or you can shortcut that process by adding some nitrogen (as nitrates) from a bag. There is no difference to what you end up with; soil that contains nitrogen.

Your point of view is equivalent to saying that oxygen in the atmosphere has some intrinsic quality of “naturaliness” that oxygen from a bottle doesn’t have. They are the same thing.

In contrast we create government in part to deal with issues that are sufficiently large and complex that we can’t adequately quantify them, yet we know they require action. I haven’t yet seen the cost-benefit analysis that explained why we should go to war in Afghanistan, and how much we should spend there, yet I’ve no doubt it was the right thing to do (though done poorly). Similarly, though less dramatically, we know that some chemicals are sufficiently harmful that they should be banned. We make such decisions knowing that in some circumstances a particular ban could end up costing more lives than it saves, but also recognizing the human instinct that some things are serious enough that we can’t wait for absolute proof.

My quibble with these regulations isn’t that they have no right to do this, but that they haven’t established that the risks are serious enough.

You say that soil is not of intrinsic value, which is a statement I confess I don’t understand. I’d tend to argue that nothing has intrinsic value, but assuming we’re talking about value that isn’t particularly financial, then soil has value as part of the ecosystem. That value isn’t expressed in tonnes of grain, or in any other single measure, but there’s good reason to believe that life requires a certain level of biodiversity for us to continue (that’s not making a green point, just a practical one; if the world was us and concrete we wouldn’t survive long). I suspect it’s actually impossible to quantify that value to man, even while we know it is of value.

The point I’m trying to make, and that it seems you support when you say that soil “is valuable to man because it grows stuff” is that increasingly soil *doesn’t* grow stuff, it provides a medium for holding a plant upright while chemicals grow stuff. That’s OK, I suppose, but it’s a strange distortion of what we’ve traditionally meant by the word ‘soil’.

Nick – I’ve no doubt Johnathon knows his stuff, but that doesn’t mean I can’t know a fair amount too. After all, Johnathon has suggested that the average carrot consumer can develop an understanding of pesticides I’d expect to see in an undergrad in chemistry or medicine, plus an appreciation of risk and ecology at similar levels.

Personally, I think the answer is to force the EU to extend the legislation to cover all the different substances that a detailed analysis could find in “organic” vegetables. Label them. Test them. Ban them.

When the packaging for lettuce has to be expanded tenfold just to fit on the huge list of scary chemical polysyllabia, and all those terrifyingly inscrutable E-numbers like E140 and E160a and E460, they’ll either learn or starve. While regulation is a problem, it’s the selective regulation based on manufacturing method that’s at the heart of it. That and widespread ignorance.

And it should be culturally acceptable for anyone thick enough not to know that everything they eat is made entirely from “chemicals” to be treated as educationally subnormal.

They’re a total waste of E948.

We ingest a wide variety of carcinogens and toxic chemicals in very small amounts in our food every day. All the same, the poison is in the dose, which is too small to harm us. Our bodies naturally detoxify themselves. That’s why we have a liver, kidneys, a pancreas, and so on. If not, you wouldn’t be here to read this.

It’s all about a yearning for prevention of change (which is seen entirely as decay from the perfect) and the imposition of order and perfection. There’s more but that’s the heart of the impulse.