Coase, Pigou and the potato: Whither farmers' rights?

Enrico Bertacchini ()

Ecological Economics, 2008, vol. 68, issue 1-2, 183-193

Abstract: This paper explores the realization of farmers' rights in order to reward farming communities for their contribution in conserving and developing crop genetic resources. Current proposals to realize farmers' rights follow both Coasean and Pigouvian approaches, which try to solve the public good dilemma generated by traditional farmers in supplying agrobiodiversity. However, both the solutions not only may be difficult to realize but also provide just incomplete incentives to traditional farmers in enhancing in situ genetic diversity. In analogy with emerging open source models in the digital information economy, I contend that traditional farming systems, with the customary practices of seed saving and exchange, must be regarded as a common based peer organization for germplasm production and distribution. For this reason, new options for implementing farmers' rights should be devised in order to strengthen farmers' practices to use and exchange seeds within the traditional seed systems.

Keywords: Farmers'; rights; Genetic; resources; Agrobiodiversity; Conservation; Benefit; sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921-8009(08)00107-9
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:68:y:2008:i:1-2:p:183-193

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 ().