{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.015018773466833541, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.607438016528926, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Environmental Protection, Resource Depletion, and the Sustainability of Developing Country Agriculture

The continuing trend toward energy-intensive agriculture raises a number of important questions with respect to resource use. What will be the impact of high levels of petrochemical applications on the environment? How rapidly will the demand for energy grow, and how long will nonrenewable energy supplies last? Will global climatic change lead to the regulation or taxation of energy? How will agricultural productivity growth fare in the developing countries relative to the developed countries? What are the implications of these questions for the long-run research agenda in agriculture? These questions do not imply that there is a limit to growth. However, maintaining long-run growth potential in agriculture requires an appropriate level of investment in research to insure that we do not do irreparable damage to the environment and that cost-effective substitutes are available when petrochemical resources become depleted. We argue in this article that the threat to sustained agricultural growth, whether from pollution or resource depletion, comes mainly from energy consumption in the nonagricultural sector. We also argue that short-run price incentives are unlikely to encourage adequate investment in environmental protection, particularly in the developing countries and in research on alternative energy sources, and that this poses a threat to the sustainability of developing country agricultural growth. The next section of this article deals with the demand for environ-