Answering farmers’ climate vs. hunger dilemma? It’s textbook.

April 10, 2023 Neal Urwitz

Neal Urwitz

Senior Vice President Public Affairs

Neal Urwitz works at the intersection of the policy process and public relations, focusing on using public pressure to create policy change.

An active Democrat, he worked closely with National Security Leaders for Biden, a large third-party organization supporting President Biden’s campaign. A PR professional with 16 years’ experience, he has worked with many clean energy, energy efficiency, technology, transportation, and defense clients on thought leadership and policy advocacy campaigns.

Neal served as Director of External Relations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) a large national security think tank, and has worked at PR firms including Edelman, kglobal, and LEVICK. An op-ed expert, he has ghostwritten and placed op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post among many others, and has published under his own name in The USA Today, Politico, The Houston Chronicle, CNN.com and FoxNews.com.

Agriculture

This op-ed was originally released by the Des Moines Register on April 9, 2023 by guest columnist and Antenna VP, Neal Urwitz. Read it in full, here.

Back in college, I thought positive economic externalities – i.e., when the benefit of a transaction or economic opportunity spilled over to people not otherwise involved – were mostly confined to graphs in textbooks and the occasional vaccination campaign. Companies, after all, are pretty adept at squeezing all the value they can out of any transaction. 

Yet positive externalities exist, and America’s farms are home to the most important example. Farmers will drive two essential efforts in the coming years. First, they must produce enough food to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Second, if they are going to help with climate change mitigation, they will need to lower their greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.

Feeding the world and preventing the planet from burning are quintessential positive externalities. Therefore, we will have to start paying farmers to adopt technologies that can help them do both. It is, quite literally, textbook economics. 

Continue reading on the Des Moines Register.

 

 

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