Bioeconomics of Climate Change Adaptation: Coffee Berry Borer and Shade-Grown

Shady Atallah and Miguel Gomez

No 170215, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Research on climate change in recent decades has disproportionately focused on predicting impacts while largely ignoring adaptation strategies. How agricultural systems can adapt to minimize the uncertainty caused by rising temperatures is one of the most important research issues today. We focus on the coffee berry borer, the most important coffee pest worldwide, which has recently expanded across the tropics as a result of rising temperatures, threatening coffee farms worldwide. Intercropping shade trees with coffee trees is being promoted as a promising climate change adaptation strategy that can protect coffee plantations from microclimate variability and reduce pest infestations. Little is known, however, on whether or not the benefits of the ecological services provided by shade trees justify the ensuing yield reduction associated with shade-grown coffee production systems. We develop a computational, bioeconomic model to analyze the ecological and economic sustainability of switching from a sun-grown to shade-grown coffee system as a climate change adaptation strategy. In particular, we model the spatial-dynamic pest diffusion at the plant level and evaluate alternative shading strategies based on farm expected net present values. Using parameters from Colombia, preliminary model findings suggest that the ecological benefits of shade-grown planting systems justify the forgone revenues from lower per acre yields only for high levels of shading. We solve for the threshold net price premium of shade-grown coffee that would make this climate change adaptation strategy cost-effective at moderate shading levels.

Keywords: Crop Production/Industries; Environmental Economics and Policy; Resource/Energy Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/170215/files/CBB-AAEA%202014-7-26.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea14:170215

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.170215

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().