Paper prepared for presentation at the 149th EAAE Seminar 'Structural change in agri-food chains: new relations between farm sector, food industry and retail sector'
A growing body of literature shows that full-cooperation among farmers to manage productive ecosystem services would yield gains with respect to uncoordinated approaches. The public good feature of these ecosystem services may, however, hinder the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale. In this paper, we introduce in a coalition formation game a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model of fruit pollination, where pollinaton depends on the distance to the choosen location of natural habitats. We analyse: (i) which coalitions are stable; (ii) what benefits they provide; (iii) how cooperation depends on the initial landscape structure; and (iv) how policy instruments affect cooperation. The theoretical model presents the rationality of cooperation but, due to the detailed heterogeneity and complex spatial interactions among farms, we use a numerical example to determine the stable coalitions. We find that only small coalitions are stable and that the benefits of cooperation decrease when the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase. Policy instruments can increase the interest for cooperation but per-hectare payments and minimum participation rules may reduce the habitat area at the margin (by decreasing the stability of coalitions). Price premium for the coalition members increase the habitat area but its budget-effectiveness decreases as the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase.
Previous studies on the productive value of biodiversity have emphasised that crop diversity increases crop yields. Here, we focus on the management of crop biodiversity for wheat, winter barley and rapeseed productions. We introduce productive capacity of biodiversity into a structural dynamic model with supply, variable input demand and acreage functions. We estimate the model for a sample of French farms between 2007 and 2012. We highlight that biodiversity indicators influence the yield of crops and variable input uses. We find evidence that farmers manage their acreage to benefit from the productive capacity of crop biodiversity.
Acknowledgements:The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments and Pierre Dupraz for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper. This research was funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program under grant agreement n°633838 (PROVIDE project, http://www.provide-project.eu/). This work does not necessarily reflect the view of the EU and in no way anticipates the Commission's future policy.
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