Earth's Worth: Page 2 Endangered Species Handbook

Vanishing Species

Earth's Worth: Page 2

Subsidies provide another disincentive to conservation. On a worldwide basis, governments spend $700 to $900 billion per year on subsidies that actually encourage the destruction of forests and other natural areas (Grossfeld 1997). In the United States, the taxpayer pays for road building in national forests to enable logging companies to enter wilderness areas. The Forest Service charges these companies a fraction of the retail value of these trees--sometimes $10 or less for a giant tree worth $25,000. Yet almost no subsidies or tax benefits are paid for the use of recycled materials, such as paper, that would save the cutting of thousands of trees. For this reason, it is cheaper in the United States and many other countries to cut forests for paper than recycle used paper, and to obtain minerals from mines rather than from recycled metals. To further the lack of logic of this situation, one US government department encourages environmental destruction through taxpayer dollars’ subsidies for logging and mining, while others spend public funds to clean up the pollution and preserve species that become endangered from these activities.

A coalition of 26 organizations compiled information on US subsidies that have negative effects on the environment, entitled "Green Scissors '98." It found that the United States spends $49 billion every five years on subsidies and environmentally destructive programs. The report recommended drastic slashing in these "polluter pork" programs to protect the environment and save taxpayers billions of dollars of misspent money each year. The Institute for Research on Public Expenditure in the Netherlands produced a report in 1997 entitled Subsidizing Unsustainable Development: Undermining the Earth with Public Funds. After a lengthy examination of subsidies around the world, which range from inexpensive irrigation water to free land for settlers and mining operations, this study concluded that subsidies are economically counterproductive and disastrous to the environment, resulting in deforestation, overfishing, polluting and other destructive activities (Crossette 1997a). Many species are endangered as a byproduct of these subsidies.