JOURNAL 44 Multiple Choice Questions Activity Sample Task Reading text [Note: This is an extract from an Academic Reading passage on the subject of government subsidies to farmers. The text preceding this extract explained how subsidies can lead to activities which cause uneconomical and irreversible changes to the environment.] All these activities may have damaging environmental impacts. For example, land
clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertilisers
and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the
abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread of
monoculture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the
disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided some
insurance against pests or diseases in future. Soil erosion threatens the productivity of
land in both rich and poor countries. The United States, where the most careful
measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland
was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soil's productivity. The country
subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 per cent of its cropped land to
meadow or forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America.
Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that
farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports
for farm output drive up the price of land. The annual value of these subsidies is
immense: about $250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To
increase the output of crops per acre, a farmer's easiest option is to use more of the
most readily available inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in
Denmark in the period 1960-1985 and increased in The Netherlands by 150 per cent.
The quantity of pesticides applied has risen too: by 69 per cent in 1975-1984 in
Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 per cent in the frequency of application in the
three years from 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies.
The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm
support in 1984. A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that
the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall
compounded by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes). The
removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past
had been the principal causes of erosion. Farms began to diversify. The one kind of
subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the environment was the
subsidy to manage soil erosion.