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- Info
Competition for land in the American south: Agriculture, human settlement, and the environment
| Author: |
Healy, Robert G. |
| Date: |
1985 |
| Periodical: |
Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation |
| Abstract: |
This book tries to add to our understanding of long-term land adequacy at the national level by taking a comprehensive look at land-use conditions and trends in a single section of the country, the South. As its author, land economist Robert G. Healy, points out, there are several reasons why the land-use situation in the South should be of national interest. First, the South is important in its own right as a commodity producer. It is now the nation's largest producer of forest products, a major source of soybeans, poultry, and aquaculture production, an increasing factor in the cattle industry, and home to a quarter of the national population. Second, the South has a disproportionate share of the national supply of land on which crop agriculture, forestry, and grazing might expand. The South may thus be even more important to the agricultural future of the United States than it is at present. Third, the South is notable for the flexibility of its land base. Unlike the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest, where large areas of land are uniquely suited to a particular use (growing grains and trees respectively), the South has tens of millions of acres that can, if demand warrants, be devoted to crops, or to grazing, or to forestry. It is also the site of sprawling industrial and residential settlement, as well as of growing pressure to preserve environmental and recreational values. The South therefore offers a sort of laboratory for examining the competition among alternative uses of land. It is a competition that will be ever more relevant to the nation as a whole as total demand for all the products of land expands in the future. Healy's book is notable for taking a long-term and comprehensive view of the alternative competing uses of southern land. The key to resource planning in the South, Healy maintains, is to realize that uncertainty is inevitable and to take an approach to land use sufficiently conservative so that important long-term opportunities are not unnecessarily foreclosed. Because of the length of the necessary planning horizon and the multiplicity of forces affecting supply and demand, some reasonable assumptions lead to projections of massive expansions in land use; other reasonable assumptions to projections of very small changes. Healy therefore suggests a "foresight and insurance" strategy that would recognize the existence of continuing competition for land and that would focus policy interventions on carefully exploiting the South's special resource endowment in a manner that can be sustained indefinitely and with minimum impact on unpriced values. The book's final chapter contains many specific ideas. about how a reasonable level of insurance for the future might be obtained at relatively modest cost. It contains suggestions for improving farm and forest productivity, for conserving productive resources, and for protecting the natural and human environment. Nearly all the policy suggestions, Healy observes, have precedent someplace within the South. The abundance of solid, implementable ideas shows that some southerners have already taken important steps down the path that is traced in great detail in this book.
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