Innovative public and private measures to encourage the adoption of ecological practices and enhance the performance and sustainability of ecological agriculture
Résumé
This deliverable presents the results of the research carried out in WP6 task 6.2 of the LIFT project, on the impact of policies on the adoption of ecological approaches and on the performance and sustainability of ecological agriculture. We first provide a short synthesis of the policy implications of the studies carried out in WP2, WP3 and WP4 of the LIFT project. These studies highlight some drawbacks of currently implemented schemes, such as the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) first and second pillar subsidies that may not be adequate for extensive technologies. In addition, these studies advocate policy compensation schemes that take into consideration the income forgone, given the regional potential, both in terms of agricultural production and environmental endowments. We then focus on the effect of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) using meta-analysis and quasi-experimental methods for about 150 PES-schemes implemented worldwide. We find that the effect of PES largely depends on their characteristics. Among others, eligibility of Ecosystem Services (ES) providers, contract length, reference design, payment constraint, monitoring system and the implementation zone of the PES schemes appear to be correlated with the probability of achieving positive environmental results. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the PES-schemes investigated in this meta-analysis is shown to especially depend on the monitoring system implemented to ensure compliance and on the eligibility of ES providers. Using econometric analysis on French farm data, we also find that farmers’ incomes are not affected by their ecological practices, once the extra cost of these practices has been covered by the Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) payment or promote some efficiency gains. The real cost of the transition is therefore on average well compensated by these payments. It does not imply that farms earn extra profit, and thus appears to respect World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.