No farmer has been forced out of business. Some have earned less from farming than they otherwise would, but they’ve always been paid adequate compensation. We know this not because they bargained with government regulators, or because a parliamentary committee said so, but because each farmer freely entered into each transaction. Nor was anyone forced to pay to protect ducks, because Ducks Unlimited solicited only voluntary contributions. People who preferred to spend their disposable income on child welfare, education or some other conservation project had their wish. Everyone achieved their own balance between their desire to save ducks and their other priorities.

The ducks did well too.   Most species in North America are steadily increasing.  To date Ducks Unlimited supporters have raised over $1.4 billion and the organisation has conserved more than 9.4 million acres of waterfowl habitat.   No other environmental group can match it.

Some people worry that the driving force for all this is the duck hunters who provide the core volunteer support and most of the dollars.  Ducks Unlimited are unapologetic. Outdoor people celebrate the traditions and heritage of sport hunting as an integral part of sound wildlife management. The rest of us, including millions of birdwatchers, naturalists, fishermen, and photographers benefit because they want to shoot more ducks. Even predators benefit because Ducks Unlimited have avoided getting embroiled in predator control programmes, arguing that they were expensive, and often ineffective. The best way to help ducks, and accidentally all sorts of other wild life, is to protect large areas of wetland and leave them alone. Amen to that.

The immediate beneficiaries are obvious. People who like shooting or looking at ducks, get more wetlands preserved than they would pay for themselves. Farmers get a government cheque, which enables some to go on farming.  Politicians from farming states get more votes, and civil servants get comfortable jobs. Four separate programmes means four separate secretariats! So who is harmed?

The first victim is the taxpayer. Politicians may call these "voluntary" programmes but no one has yet invented a voluntary tax. True the farmers don’t have to take the cheque and set aside the swamp, but the taxpayer had no choice. "Voluntary" in this context just means that the farmer is not forcibly expropriated by the state. The rest of us might or might not like ducks, some of us may violently object to duck hunting, but we still have to pay up. There is no outcry simply because each person pays only a few cents, and it’s not worth the bother of complaining. I guess I would not complain either if the tax were the only harm.

Unfortunately there are at least two other victims; poor people in the third world, and ducks. Western farm subsidies harm developing country farmers. The extra western farms compete for fuel and fertiliser, and their output depresses world food prices. Third world farmers find it more difficult to sell to the US and western surpluses are dumped intermittently on poor countries, albeit disguised as lifesaving food aid.  This undercuts local farmers again.  Earlier dumping often caused the food shortage in the first place. The less foolish of the anti-capitalist protesters at Seattle, Prague, Lund and Genoa recognise this, and have long campaigned against rich world farming subsidies.

However the real problem is in the long run. Government money for this sort of thing is never entirely new money. Duck hunters don’t just pay up automatically.   They are rational and respond to campaigns for particular local swamps or special habitats. When government saves the swamp, they spend their money elsewhere. This might not matter if the government could guarantee to pay more over the long term than the duck hunters would have done, but they can’t. Government subsidy always displaces more private funding than it supplies. There are many examples. A famous one is the UK’s socialised health care system. The developed country with the largest government healthcare sector has the lowest overall health expenditure, because the NHS displaced more private money than it provided.

The same will happen with wetland preservation. The anti-hunting fraternity from the big cities will soon object to government paying to support hunting. They will cut the subsidies, restrict the hunting and demand increased public access to the swamps. Wetlands will turn into theme parks for city dwellers.

Beware Ducks Unlimited! You are being bribed with your own money. It feels good now, but in the long run the state will ruin both the sport and the wildlife you cherish.

Jim Thornton 30 July 2001