Agricultural policy

Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultural product markets. Outcomes can involve, for example, a guaranteed supply level, price stability, product quality, product selection, land use or employment.

An example of the breadth and types of agriculture policy concerns can be found in the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics article Agricultural Economies of Australia and New Zealand which says that the major challenges and issues faced by their industrial agriculture industry are:

Agriculture remains the largest single contributor to the livelihoods of the 75% of the world's poor who live in rural areas. Encouraging agricultural growth is therefore an important aspect of agricultural policy in the developing world. In addition, a recent Natural Resource Perspective paper by the Overseas Development Institute found that good infrastructure, education and effective information services in rural areas were necessary to improve the chances of making agriculture work for the poor.

The biosecurity concerns facing industrial agriculture can be illustrated by:

Use of animal vaccines can create new viruses that kill people and cause flu pandemic threats. H5N1 is an example of where this might have already occurred. According to the CDC article H5N1 Outbreaks and Enzootic Influenza by Robert G. Webster et al.:"Transmission of highly pathogenic H5N1 from domestic poultry back to migratory waterfowl in western China has increased the geographic spread. The spread of H5N1 and its likely reintroduction to domestic poultry increase the need for good agricultural vaccines. In fact, the root cause of the continuing H5N1 pandemic threat may be the way the pathogenicity of H5N1 viruses is masked by co-circulating influenza viruses or bad agricultural vaccines." Dr. Robert Webster explains: "If you use a good vaccine you can prevent the transmission within poultry and to humans. But if they have been using vaccines now [in China] for several years, why is there so much bird flu? There is bad vaccine that stops the disease in the bird but the bird goes on pooping out virus and maintaining it and changing it. And I think this is what is going on in China. It has to be. Either there is not enough vaccine being used or there is substandard vaccine being used. Probably both. It’s not just China. We can’t blame China for substandard vaccines. I think there are substandard vaccines for influenza in poultry all over the world."

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Wikipedia