How government can promote good stewardship of creation Biblically, without subsidies and regulations

Currently, the government plays a significant role in promoting industrial agriculture, and therefore all the damage to human health and God’s creation that comes with it. The government does this mostly through subsidies and regulations.

Consider how most subsidies are for grain monocrops that are used to make seed oils and animal feeds. Seed oils wouldn't naturally be the best choice for making dietary fats due to the extensive processing they must undergo, but when subsidies make them artifically cheap, it makes sense economically. Farm animals don't naturally have a diet of concentrated grains. In a smaller, local food economy, farm animals would largely consist off food scraps and grass. But when subsidies make grains artifically cheap, they become good animal feed.

Consider the 2013 so-called “Monsanto Protection Act” which allowed GMO seeds to be planted and sold while still under judicial review.

The government creates many obstacles to smaller, local operations by passing regulations (such as milk pastuerization laws) that are easier for large industries to comply with.

Regenerative agriculture is a beautiful example of an alternative to industrial monocrops, segregated plant and animal agriculture, farm chemicals, soil degredation, and artifical fertilizers that takes advantage of symbiotic relationships in God's creation to produce food in a way that improves upon creation, cares for the welfare of animals, and protects human health. It does this through practices like rotational grazing and integrated plant and animal operations.

If the government is such a large factor in maintaining the current system of industrial agriculture, what could we hope for the government to do instead, to encourage regenerative operations rather than industrial ones? A simple answer would be shifting subsidies and regulations to favor better practices. This would surely be better than the current system.

But the government can't be trusted to priortize the long-term welfare of creation while it's so heavily beholden to financial interests. Fundamentally, it would still be government overreach and put determinations about what is best for humans and creation in the wrong hands.

Removing all government involvement with food regulation and incentives would be a great step in the right direction and would be help immensely. But there’s more a righteous role government could be playing. In the Old Testament, even before the law, God instituted a system of Biblical justice based on restitution: demanding appropriate repayment for harm caused to others by perpetrators. Our current justice system doesn't operate this way. Consider the standard practrice of imprisoning offenders. Rather than criminals repaying those affected by what they have done, the innocent essentially pay a price as they must support incarceration through taxes.

Numbers 35 describes Biblical restitution:

You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. (Numbers 35:33)

The word “pollute” used in this verse means to defile or corrupt. Just as bloodshed “pollutes” the land, so do farming practices that mistreat animals, harm human health, and damage creation.

The principle is that pollution can only be atoned for by the one who caused it. Heaping the burden of environmental damage and health problems on taxpayers and consumers downstream is unjust.

Instead, assigning the costs of these unintended consequences to the origin, as best as possible, is just, and should be a role of a righteous government.

This would naturally discourage practices such as using farm chemicals. If the manufacturers were held responsible for the costs of restoring pollinator populations, cancer treatments, repairing degraded soil, and more, the cost of their product would skyrocket, appropriately reflecting its real cost.

This does't mean the costs would land on farmers or consumers. Fundamentally it would mean a reordering of the economy where healthy food would cost more, but massive taxes would not be needed to repair environemental damage caused by industrial agriculture (such as degraded soils, flooding disasters, and ocean dead zones that kill wildlife, fishing industries, and tourism) and $4.9 trillion dollars a year would not need to be spent on healthcare in US alone. How much healthcare spending goes towards chronic diseases caused by the unhealthy food that is a product of our industrial agriculture system and disease outbreaks such as swine flu that can be traced back to it? Not to mention the economy of 22 million Americans employed in healthcare alone, sitting in offices all day under flourescence lights eating cafeteria junk food, instead of tending creation outdoores as farmers like 90+% of Americans used to do?

This is idealistic, but it’s an ideal that a righteous government could aim for.

Of course it would be impossible to fully assign the costs of industrial agriculture to their source (we can't know what all the costs are or where they come from, especially when they crop up so far down the road and so far from the source), but it would be a righteous endeavor to figure it out as much as possible.

Could a government so influenced by industry and financial interests be trusted to do this effectively? Probably not, at least not well, but if it operated fundamentally with this goal for executing justice, it would only help.

I pose this mainly as an alternative to show that Christians do not need to think that more government subsidies or regulations (or just shifted subsidies and regulations) is the only hope for achieving better creation stewardship and human health. Too often, Christians are calling for these kinds of solutions. Realistically, these shifts will happen from grassroots movements as consumers demand it more. And getting government out of the way of food regulation is essential no matter what. But it's helpful to understand what a righetous, Christian government could look like.