Alternative Futures For U S Agriculture

Extract: This study reports on an ongoing research effort in the Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service (ESCS) aimed at generating and maintaining up-to-date price, production, consumption, and trade projections for agricultural commodities in the major countries and regions of the world. The study assesses alternative world food prospects through the use of a mathematical model of the world's grain-oilseeds-livestock economies (GOL) model. The study is being published in four volumes. Volume 1, an analytical report, discusses the output of the model's projections to 1985. Volume 2 contains detailed country and regional supply-distribution tables and related price and growth rate tables. Volume 3 describes and presents the mathematical equations used in the GOL model. Volume 4 will be a users' manual. Volume 2 is expected to be updated periodically to maintain a current set of alternative projections.

Nutrients from farms in the Mississippi River Basin are the leading cause of the Gulf of Mexico‘s 'Dead Zone,' a 5,000 to 7,000 square mile region where declining oxygen levels are threatening the survival of marine life. From the Corn Belt to the Gulf explores how new agricultural policy can help alleviate this problem, and at the same time improve water quality overall, enhance biodiversity, improve the quality of life for the people who live and work in Corn Belt communities, and relieve downstream flooding. The themes of the book are the far-reaching environmental impacts of Corn Belt agriculture, including associated economic and social effects at multiple spatial scales - and the potential for future agricultural policy to address those impacts through changes in agricultural landscapes and practices. We know that the environmental 'footprint' of Corn Belt agriculture extends beyond farmland and adjacent lakes and streams to groundwater, rivers, cities downstream, into the Gulf of Mexico, and, ultimately, to global oceanic and atmospheric systems. And we acknowledge that agricultural policies, including commodity support payments, have economic impacts at the national and international levels. Pressing negotiations with America‘s trade partners, along with increasing societal attention to both the costs and environmental effects of current agricultural policy, are creating momentum for policy change. From the Corn Belt to the Gulf presents innovative, integrated assessments of the agriculture and ecological systems in the Mississippi River Basin along with studies of local Iowa agricultural watersheds. Contributors from multiple academic and professional disciplines discuss how agricultural policies have contributed to current environmental conditions, and, in what the authors term 'alternative futures' for agricultural landscapes, envision how new policy can help achieve more beneficial patterns.