Tax top of the food chain to aid environmental sust...( Ithaca NY -- Applying the pollute...)

Ithaca, NY -- Applying the "polluter pays" principle, a Cornell University ecologist and author suggests a way to improve the environmental sustainability of agriculture: Levy taxes according to food-chain ranking so that products with the worst environmental impact cost the most.

"We should internalize the costs of dietary preferences. If one chooses to eat high-impact food, one should pay the full costs of such a choice," says David Pimentel, the professor of ecology and agricultural science who is a co-editor and co-author of the newly published book Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health (Island Press, 2000, ISBN 1-55963-807-9).

At the top of the ecologist's tax table (see information box below) -- and highest in his ranking of foods that require the most resources to produce while wreaking more environmental degradation -- are meats from factory-farmed mammals, such as beef, pork and eggs. The same foods are the least healthy when consumed in excess, Pimentel notes.

To be taxed the least are products at the bottom of humans' food chain -- foods that are more efficiently grown while causing less environmental impact -- such as legumes, grains, vegetables, starch crops, fruits and nuts. People eating plant-based diets generally consume fewer health-care resources, the author maintains.

Pimentel's beef with beef and other mammalian food products at the top of the food chain centers on efficiencies of production and their "true costs," including long-term degradation of the environment. Writing a chapter on agricultural sustainability with Robert Goodland, the tropical ecologist and adviser to the World Bank, the Cornell professor offers statistics to spoil the appetite of filet mignon fans:

• Seven pounds of cattle feed is required to produce a pound of beef, compared with two pounds of fish feed for some aquaculture species. o In the United States, the 104-million-st
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