The economics of the Food versus Biodiversity debate

Vincent Martinet

No 182800, 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Ecologists discuss the “food versus biodiversity” trade-offs in the fol- lowing terms: what is the land use configuration that minimizes biodiver- sity loss for a given food production target. This is, in economic terms, a cost-effectiveness approach related to the concept of Pareto-efficiency in the food-biodiversity outcomes map. This paper argues that economists should participate in this debate. A first set of results shows how the introduction of some basic micro-economic considerations modifies or reinforces the rec- ommendations of the ecological literature on how to preserve biodiversity while producing food. A second set of arguments emphasizes that it is not necessarily sensible, from an economic point of view, to set the debate in terms of food versus biodiversity. A wider, welfarist approach should be used.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/182800/files/M ... ity_debate-508_a.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:eaae14:182800

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.182800

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().