Promoting conservation and public goods provision

1. Promoting conservation and public goods provision Lecture 29. Economics of Food Markets Alan Matthews

2. What we want to learn • The methods which can be used to value the positive environmental benefits of agriculture to help decide how much to purchase • The range of policy instruments available to encourage the provision of positive environmental externalities from land management

3. The environmental reference level • What is a benefit? What is environmental pollution? • Polluter pays concept is a social construct • Wetlands – farmers vs environmentalists • Preservation of tropical rain forests • Access to farmland for recreation • Traditional farm buildings • Animal welfare • Good of Good Farming Practice defines the current reference level

4. Measuring environmental benefits • Different kinds of value • Use value • Option value • Existence value • Bequest value

5. Assessing willingness to pay • Travel cost method • Restricted to measuring use value by visitors • Hedonic price method • Restricted to measuring use value by those who trade in land or houses • Contingent valuation method • Only method to measure non-use values • Potential biases • Benefit transfer techniques

6. Conservation instruments • Education and voluntary stewardship • Huge amount of environmental goods provided as a result of sense of stewardship • Suggests potential for education as a conservation instrument • But also suggests that compensation payments could undermine this ethical approach

7. Conservation instruments • Financial incentives • Management agreements with individual farmers (UK Wildlife and Countryside Act) • Flat rate universal schemes (Irish REPS) • Tiered competitive tendering schemes (UK Countryside Stewardship Scheme)

8. Conservation instruments • Cross-compliance • Becomes possible with shift from market price support to direct payments • Increases the public return from direct payments • But may legitimise direct payments which otherwise would be hard to justify

9. Conservation instruments • Planning designation • Are farmers entitled to compensation for restrictions? (raises the environmental reference level again) • But what if the value of the resource depends on active management? • Public acquisition • National Parks • Conservation easements

10. General principles • Assign priority to agri-environment services which are more highly valued or which can be provided at lower cost • Targeting is desirable, but there is a trade-off with administration and monitoring costs • Importance of farmer participation and awareness