Assessing the Economic Benefits to Agriculture from Air Pollution Control

Abstract

Agricultural crop production is highly dependent upon environmental conditions among which air quality plays a central role. Various air pollutants have been identified as a potential influence on commercial crops including SO 2 , NOx, O 3 and CO 2 . In particular, ozone in the lower atmosphere has been identified as a serious cause of crop loss in the United States and seems likely to be creating similar losses in Europe. In this paper the methods which can be applied to assess the economic damages from air pollution are critically reviewed. This requires measuring pollutant concentrations, relating these to physical crop damages, and estimating the reactions of the agricultural sector and consumers to give welfare changes in terms of consumers' surplus and producers' quasi-rents. The approach of the European open-top chamber programme (EOTCP) is shown to have neglected lessons learnt by the National Crop Loss Assessment Network (NCLAN) in the US

PROTECTING AGRICULTURAL CROPS FROM THE EFFECTS OF TROPOSPHERIC OZONE EXPOSURE: Reconciling Science and Standard Setting in the United States, Europe, and Asia

“…The NCLAN and EOTC studies adopted different approaches, the former designed to provide doseresponse information for use in economic assessments and the latter to study the mechanisms of O 3 impact and the interactions of O 3 with other environmental factors. Spash (57) argued that the EOTC program would have been more useful had it been designed to include an economic assessment of O 3 impacts.…”

“…The limitations of the earlier economic assessments persist in the later evaluations listed in Table 4. They include limited O 3 data, extrapolation from a limited set of crop and cultivar dose-response data (57), uncertainty about appropriate exposure measures, and potential errors arising from the economic model used (58 revenue approach adopted a Welfare approach refers to mathematical programming models or econometric models based on microeconomic theory (112). It takes into account the response of input and output market prices to the differential changes that pollution control causes in each person's production and consumption opportunities as well as the input and output changes that those affected can make to minimize losses or maximize gains from changes in production and consumption opportunities and in the prices of these opportunities (55).…”

Ozone reduces crop yields and alters competition with weeds such as yellow nutsedge

“…Current ambient ozone concentrations impose substantial economic costs on producers and consumers of agricultural products in the United States (Spash 1997). Considering only ozone derived from motor vehicle Ozone now causes economically significant losses in the yields of most crops, and this will get worse if current trends in rural population density continue.…”

Assessment of ozone impacts on farming systems: A bio-economic modeling approach applied to the widely diverse French case

“…It enabled us to assess the polluting impact of O 3 on crops at a scale compatible with the heterogeneity of farming systems and the local effect of different O 3 concentrations. In addition, it allowed us to consider cross-crop substitution, which can be a mitigation strategy (as recommended by Spash (1997) and Brown and Smith (1984)). Indeed, most models view land use as a fixed variable, whereas in the real world farmers can modify their production in response to changes in environmental conditions, for instance by shifting to crops with greater resistance.…”