The offshore Gulf and Alaska have seen a 50% increase in discoveries recently. The fact that there are so many wells and nothing catastrophic had happened may have led to risk-creep which could be one explanation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They were so convinced that nothing catastrophic could happen that they only invested $20 million on research and development for accident prevention and response out of the $39 billion that they invested in new gas and oil exploration over just three years. That is only a meagre 0.05% of their investment on possibly the most important part of the project. It is obvious from this that they had very little interest in protecting themselves against risk and a lot of trust that nothing would go wrong. Even on the fateful day of the blowout, a BP supervisor of the Deepwater Horizon was working on the well and could feel bad vibrations around him but made the decision to cap it until future operation, saying “it will probably be fine”. This just makes it more apparent their lack of concern for the risks involved. In the end their lax approach to risk management was the cause of the detriment to the environment and the industry.
I chose to focus this paper on risk management in agriculture because I feel that farmers face a lot of risks and it is important for them to be prepared for potential hazards. I am interested to learn about how both farmers and the government deal with these risks. I was also interested in studying this specific topic because farming is such an important industry in Ireland and it is important that it is protected and developed for the