One Health, One National Park: A Contribution to New Perspectives and Economics for Modern Times

Keith S. Howe

Village and Agriculture (Wieś i Rolnictwo), 2020, vol. 187, issue 2

Abstract: One Health is a concept that views the health of humans, animals, and the natural environment as components of a single, interdependent system. The Covid-19 pandemic, with its consequences extending far beyond the immediate impact of the coronavirus on human health, highlights the importance of this increasingly influential concept. In practice, One Health has its roots in the ancient fusion of human and animal health sciences. Over time, each field of research has evolved to develop its own approaches, methodologies, and research questions. Recently, veterinary scientists have been reintegrating, extending, and promoting One Health sciences to address contemporary problems in which health and well-being are not seen as separate entities. A prerequisite is the establishment of a conceptual framework and principles that allow for clear problem definition, interrelationships, and a level of aggregation appropriate for quantitative analysis. This paper extends this framework by considering the economic trade-offs that inevitably have to be made in the human, animal and natural subsystems, and the consequences of imposing policy interventions on them. The New Forest National Park in southern England is a case in point where this perspective is essential. In line with the Stone Mountain definition of ‘One Health’, this paper first adopts a traditional approach that combines human and animal health. Lyme disease, Alabama necrosis, bovine tuberculosis and strangles are examples of diseases that pose significant problems. The main emphasis should be on finding opportunities for socially effective risk reduction in response to the use of ‘mitigating’ resources. Payments are made to the grazing livestock subsystems to support farmers using communal land. Financial incentives, effectively headage payments, have increased the number of livestock so much that the wider natural environment may be subject to adverse side-effects that merit separate study.

Keywords: Agribusiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:polvaa:344619

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.344619

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