EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The adoption of pesticide-free wheat production and farmers' perceptions of its environmental and health effects

Robert Finger and Niklas Möhring

Ecological Economics, 2022, vol. 198, issue C

Abstract: The reduction of pesticide use is a prime issue on policy agendas worldwide. However, existing policies often fail to promote widespread adoption of low-pesticide or no-pesticide production practices. Therefore, in order to overcome this obstacle, it is important to understand why farmers hesitate to use more sustainable pest management. To this end, we investigate the relationship between farmers' perception of the adverse environmental and human health effects generated by pesticides and their decision to participate in a novel, pesticide-free wheat production standard in Switzerland. Survey data from 1073 wheat producers reveals that 14% are early adopters of the pesticide-free wheat production program and a further 44% intend to switch to this production scheme in following growing seasons. We find that farmers who perceive risks of pesticides for the environment and human health to be higher are also more likely to adopt pesticide-free production. Our results suggest that a large-scale adoption of pesticide-free production requires a broad set of (policy) instruments beyond purely financial incentives. Our findings thus have important implications for the design of sustainable production schemes.

Keywords: Pesticide; Pesticide-free; Farmer behavior; Agricultural policy; Adoption; Behavorial factors; Wheat; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922001252
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:198:y:2022:i:c:s0921800922001252

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107463

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:198:y:2022:i:c:s0921800922001252