Editor’s Note: This column is being published in advance of Friday’s Capitol Debate on pesticide buffer zones, scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Hawaii State Capitol Auditorium. Admission is free, and additional details are available on Facebook.

Earlier this year, the Hawaii House of Representatives deferred House Bill 2564. Presented as necessary for public and environmental health, the bill would have established a pilot program for pesticide buffer zones around five schools. The zones would have consisted of vegetation barriers maintained by growers.

The issue of whether the state should adopt pesticide buffer zones represents three contiguous debates about the role of government in promoting public health, regulating industrial agriculture and ensuring food sovereignty. In this essay, I attempt to survey the first of the three issues in advance of this Friday’s Capitol Debate on pesticide buffer zones.

Many accept that government should play a role in the promotion of public health. Some identify specific interests worth promotion. Few know how to achieve these interests.But assuming that we can identify a compelling interest, the government has three primary methods for promoting public health:

• Information collection and dissemination
  Government funds and conducts studies to gauge the severity of a problem, to determine the causes of a problem, and to determine how best to solve a problem. Then it distributes information about the problem to inform the decisions of individuals, businesses, and public officials. For instance, government funded studies identified the growing incidence of lung cancer, the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and the effectiveness of various programs designed to treat addiction and cancer.
• Discouraging harmful practices
  Information is often not enough to change behavior. Thus, government acts to reduce harmful practices. In some cases, they increase the cost of a behavior through taxes, fines, or regulation. In response to cigarette studies, many states raised taxes on cigarettes to discourage their use; some increased the age of sale and penalties for providing cigarettes to addiction-prone minors. In other cases, government implements outright bans, e.g., the banning of lead-based paint for use in housing in 1978 following extensive documentation of negative health effects, especially with regard to child development.
• Encouraging beneficial practices
  Research is simple to fund, pamphlets are easy to distribute, bans and fines can be instituted painlessly (enforcement less so), but encouraging adoption of healthy behavior is notoriously difficult. For proof of this, look no further than the American obesity epidemic. All human societies recognize that a combination of diet and exercise can reduce the incidence of obesity and its related injuries to health. Ours fails to encourage many people to act on this knowledge.

Granted, the end of promoting health may require a combination of the above approaches. In this case, the proposed buffer zones seek to discourage the harmful practice of exposing children to pesticides. Assuming that it is the most appropriate way, three questions help determine whether the policy is appropriate:

• Does the targeted practice cause harm?
  For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to conduct experiments that isolate the effect of pesticides on human subjects. But correlational studies, anecdotal evidence and experimental animal studies have demonstrated adverse health effects for subjects exposed to pesticides. The extent of these effects is less well documented, as are the understandings of which pesticides are most harmful and in what concentrations and combinations. Still, there’s a probable health concern related to pesticide use. Whether it meets the standard that would merit intervention is up for debate.
• Does the proposed policy limit the targeted practice?
  That a problem exists does not guarantee that the policy will solve for the problem. In this case, a vegetative barrier may not fully solve the problem. Pesticides from growers may still reach children, borne by wind. Moreover, it’s unclear whether there aren’t similar dangers from the use of pesticides to kill termites or the small-scale use of pesticides on school campuses themselves.
• Is there a less intensive way to achieve this aim?
  At minimum, this policy reduces the area available to growers for pesticide-sprayed crops and increases costs related to the maintenance of the vegetative buffers. In addition, it requires government agents to enforce the law. Resources are finite and policy goals infinite. If the intended goal can be reached by less expensive means, a proposal should be amended. For instance, rather than using a stick, the state might offer a carrot to growers, rewarding them with a subsidy for the voluntary construction of buffer zones.

These are just some ways to think through the debate about pesticide buffer zones. Obviously, public health is not the only relevant issue. Legislating pesticide buffer zones requires an examination of the political economy of industrial agriculture. Moreover, any bill affecting the productive capacity of growers is likely to affect our state’s goal of increasing the amount of locally grown food.

Policy issues are nesting dolls. As you open one, you find a few more within. The smallest (and most fundamental) dolls are those issues that the earliest political philosophers like Plato engaged explicitly. What is the role of government? What is the good life? What is freedom? When we speak for or against pesticide buffer zones, we answer these questions, even if we are not aware.

The practice of debate can help us to design better policy by subjecting our assumptions to rigorous analysis. But the best debates also allow us to examine those basic questions which to this day remain contentious. In a world of ideological siloing and partisan brinkmanship, debate matters today more than ever.

Friday’s debate is presented by Debate Hawaii in conjunction with Civil Beat. Read more about the debate series here.