Explaining Non-Adoption of Practices to Prevent Dryland Salinity in Western Australia: Implications for Policy

Abstract

In agricultural regions of Western Australia in the coming decades, dryland salinity will result in the loss of millions of hectares of productive agricultural land, will severely affect native vegetation and fauna, will continue to salinise almost all waterways and lakes, and will cause great damage to roads, buildings and other infrastructure. Scientists believe that to avert (or even to significantly reduce) this disaster, very large areas of current agricultural land would need to be converted to perennial plant species, either trees or perennial pastures. Although the farming community in Western Australia has become much more aware of issues of natural resource conservation in the past two decades, its response so far to the salinity problem has been on a scale which is orders of magnitude smaller than recommended by scientists. This paper explores reasons for this, based on empirical and theoretical literature concerned with adoption of innovations, decision making under uncertainty, the value of information, the economics of farm management, the theory of market failure, and transaction costs. Lack of awareness of salinity is probably not a major factor explaining slow and low adoption of the recommended practices. Rather, the major factors relate to the economic costs and benefits of current treatment options, the difficulties of trialling the options, long time scales, externalities, and social issues. This combination of factors means that the problem in many regions is extremely adverse to rapid adoption, probably more so than for any other agricultural issue in Australia. In other words, farmer reluctance to adopt the radical changes being recommended is completely understandable and, indeed, reasonable from the farmers’ perspectives. Current policy measures and extension programs are doing little or nothing to change the underlying causes of non-adoption. Measures which would begin to do so are urgently needed. The top priority should be investment to develop new, profitable, perennial-plant-based agricultural systems, but this area has, up to now, received relatively little funding.