When people hear that there is a program that sometimes pays farmers not to grow crops, it’s often taken as the height of government folly. In truth, there’s some very sound thinking behind the program.
The alternative for keeping farmers alive in an industry where a year of high crop yields can drop prices far below production costs is a system of government price supports. Under that system, farmers would plow fields, plant crops, and use all the normal amounts of water, pesticides, and fertilizer, all to produce crops the market didn’t need. Paying farmers not to grow the crops is better for the farmer, better for the environment, better for the markets, and far cheaper for the government. As side benefits, it helps recharge farm lands by encouraging fields to be fallow, improves biodiversity by providing more space for native plants, and reduces pest species by not holding vast amounts of unneeded crops in storage.
In some circumstances, paying people to not do something can turn out to be far more effective than paying them for some action—and that’s true not just in farming.
A team of researchers has shown that there is a surprisingly cheap and easy way to slow the pace of deforestation in Uganda: Just pay landowners small sums not to cut down their trees. Their study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, demonstrated this by conducting something all too rare in environmental policy — a controlled experiment.
The temptation for those who live near tropical forests all over the world is to sell off their trees. They can generate an immediate bump of income, and follow up by farming the former forest lands. However, this kind of farming is notoriously unsustainable, as forest soils tend to be poor. After a few years of crops, those living next to forests are left with little choice but to fell more acres of forest.
But what if instead of having an erratic, unsustainable income generated from deforestation, the people who live there were rewarded for being the guardians of the trees?
It’s not a new idea.
The idea of paying people in poorer countries to protect their forests has long attracted interest from those concerned about climate change. The United Nations set up a program, known as REDD Plus (for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), to channel $10 billion from wealthy donors like Norway and Japan to poorer nations to slow deforestation trends responsible for about 10 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions each year.
But it’s not been clear before that it’s also an effective idea. After all, the whole issue with controlling practices in remote areas is that they’re remote. How do you determine if landowners are following through once they have a check in hand?
Many experts have long been skeptical that such “payment for ecosystem services” programs actually work. How does anyone know the money is not just flowing to people who would have preserved their forests anyway? What if people take money to protect their own land but then go cut down trees elsewhere?
What’s new is that researchers have tested the idea in the field, using both ground observation and satellite imagery. They tested it under the conditions of a scientific experiment, complete with control villages where there were no such payments.
Over the next two years, they saw forest cover drop 9.1 percent in the control villages. But in the villages where voluntary payments were offered, one-third of the landowners signed up and forest cover declined just 4.2 percent. Further analysis showed that deforestation was not simply shifting to nearby lands, as feared.
Not only was the program effective, it was cheap. In fact, it was far cheaper than most schemes for cutting carbon. The current price of a ton of CO2 on the California exchange is close to $13. The price for keeping a ton of carbon dioxide in the forest using the program was $1.11 per ton.
The Uganda study shows that this kind of program can be singularly effective. Just as with programs that pay farmers to leave fields fallow, the program also has other ecological benefits. Areas with better access could also tie this program to ecotourism, or to programs that promote the preservation of endangered animal species.
Instead of charging people a penalty for what they’ve done, it can be much more effective to reward them for what they haven’t done.