Sending the future up in smoke

Here, as our informant put it, is “today’s chapter in a seemingly never-ending story”.

The state legislature of North Carolina in the United States is minded to cut all funding to the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund. That’s short-sighted and a great shame.

Tobacco, unlike, say, opium poppy, is not an easy crop, to grow or to defend. Wendell Berry, although he doesn’t himself grow it, is surrounded by people, including family, who do and he has worked for many of them. Berry has written elegiacally about tobacco, and the essential dilemma it presents, now that demand has fallen. I can’t find my copy of that essay right now (or on the web) but the gist of it was that a high-value crop like tobacco spared the environment because by dint of skill and hard work a family could make a decent living from a relatively small patch of land for the tobacco and the food they needed.

North Carolina’s Tobacco Trust Fund was established with the state’s share of money that the tobacco companies paid in settlement of lawsuits, and is intended to protect farms and smooth the transition from tobacco to new crops, new farming systems, and new approaches to local sales. In other words, to promote diversification. By all accounts, it has worked. One advocate for, and beneficiary of, the Fund put forward these numbers:

In the past three years alone, RAFI’s Tobacco Community Reinvestment Fund has brought over $733 million into communities throughout the state and created or preserved more than 4,100 jobs. All these benefits come from a relatively modest investment: $3.6 million of Tobacco Trust Fund money distributed to 367 innovative farmers in awards of less than $10,000 per individual or $30,000 per community project. Each dollar invested has led to $205 circulating in our state’s economy, an incredible return on investment with direct benefits to our tax base.

Why North Carolina is planning to cut the Fund is not at all clear to me. This certainly isn’t a case like that of the genebanks at Pavlovsk, or Wellesbourne, or Jharkand, where land is deemed more valuable for other purposes. But it shares the same basic underlying premise; that the future can take care of itself. Where agriculture is concerned, with its dependence on living resources and human ingenuity and knowledge, that is often simply wrong. There’s money to be saved (or made) now, but only because those who make and save it now will not have to pay out in future for what they destroy now.

Not every piddling genebank or subsidy scheme deserves to remain untouched, but it doesn’t take a genius or a seer to realize that the costs down the line often far outweigh the benefits here and now. We don’t really know how to measure those costs properly, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the rules of the game require that we do, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change the rules.