Eco-Social Contradictions, Illustrated.

Photo from CBC News, taken by Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press

On the news today CBC offers up a simplistic analysis of a pending trade deal that Canada is about to sign with South Korea. The headline reads "South Korean trade deal sets up fight between auto, agriculture sectors" (see article here) and suggests that "Pork and beef producers could both benefit significantly from the deal", whereas the Canadian auto sector would have much to lose from lower Canadian tariffs on Korean cars. The analysis is simplistic in a number of ways, but I'd like to tackle the notion that the agricultural sector will 'benefit' in more detail...

Increased access to Korean markets would likely grow pork and beef exports. But it's not so clear that this necessarily results in a net 'benefit'. Presumably exports will grow, which will spur additional production of pork and beef. This is 'beneficial' to Canada's current accounts - but does it really benefit 'producers' in the long run? Probably not. It certainly doesn't benefit small scale pork and beef producers, who tend not to sell their products beyond their region. It's typically the largescale producers - the industrial agricultural producers - which take part in these 'new markets'. Needless to say these largescale producers wreak havoc upon the environment: They draw heavily from fresh water resources, and in turn often contaminate said resources from waste and runoff; They also produce inordinate amounts of greenhouse gases, contributing to anthropogenic climate change. There are also social consequences: These massive industrial complexes will hire new workers, which on one hand is beneficial, yet often these jobs are temporary, insecure, and feature poverty wages. Often foreign workers will be brought in with strict limitations placed on their working conditions and splitting up their families (thanks to unfair immigration regulations). Increases in production may yield higher profits for a while, but the irony is that often the result of higher quantities of pork and beef eventually results in a decrease in prices (hooray for the self-equilibrating market!) - so eventually producers have to produce even more to yield the same returns (a problem which impacts those small scale farmers even moreso). Of course, lower prices can be beneficial for consumers, but one needs to ask a fundamental question: Do we really need to encourage more meat consumption in rich nations like South Korea and Canada? Aren't there enough social and ecological problems from the overconsumption of meat in industrialized countries (think obesity and related healthcare costs)? Doesn't this then just feed a cyclical problem that needs to be reversed in the first place?

So sure, there are some benefits from a trade deal with South Korea, and some people and companies will stand to gain from this. But in many ways these benefits are temporary. And furthermore, there are social and environmental costs at the same time. So what are we to make of all these intertwining benefits and costs? Traditional economists apply a cost-benefit analysis to the situation, inferring a financial value to all the gains and losses to determine wether there is a 'socially-optimal' outcome to a trade deal. But inevitably these types of analyses are flawed and redundant: First, the costs and benefits are so complex, so layered, that trying to even document them all becomes dizzyingly difficult, if not impossible (do you, for instance, include the future costs of anthropogenic climate change, for instance?). Secondly, applying a financial value to some of these costs and benefits is a highly subjective exercise (how do place a value of fresh water reserves - are they not invaluable?). Third, research shows that much of the time politicians don't even follow the advice of cost benefit analyses - they just do what their ideology or their constituents or their funders tell them to do in the first place. What a mess.

Applying my EPE lens, I call this an eco-social contradiction: A situation in which a new policy or project produces an array of social and ecological outcomes which seem to contradict one another to the point where it is unclear or impossible to truly claim that there is a 'net benefit' or 'net loss'.  In our contemporary neoliberal society, new legislation or megaprojects inevitably present us with such eco-social contradictions, but what is frustrating is that often such changes are presented to the public as 'sustainable' or 'beneficial' both socially and ecologically. In reality such 'fixes' are almost always understood by decision-makers in economic terms only, and their true purpose lies in a very simplistic objective: Growing the domestic product. Ironically, GDP growth is itself an eco-social contradiction. As any political economist would agree, it is not clear that GDP growth actually results in a net benefit to society - since it also tends to produce serious costs, sometimes environmental degradation, sometimes increasing inequality, sometimes decline in social wellbeing or even human welfare - despite the constant rhetoric from the annals of power that growth alleviates all these problems!

Where do we go with such eco-social contradictions? I worry that they will be the defining challenges of future generations. What do you think?