Pesticide externalities from the US agricultural sector -- The impact of internalization, reduced pesticide application rates, and climate change

Nikolinka Koleva, Uwe Schneider () and Bruce McCarl

No FNU-177, Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University

Abstract: Pesticides used in agricultural production affect environmental quality and human health. These external costs can amplify due to climate change because pest pressure and optimal pesticide application rates vary with weather and climate conditions. This study uses mathematical programming to examine alternative assumptions about regulations of external costs from pesticide applications in US agriculture. We use two climate projections given by the Canadian and Hadley climate models. The impacts of the internalization of the pesticide externality and climate change are assessed both independently and jointly. We find that, without external cost regulation, climate change benefits from increased agricultural production in the US may be more than offset by increased environmental costs. The internalization of the pesticide externalities increase farmers’ production costs but increase farmers’ income because of price adjustments and associated welfare shifts from consumers to producers. Our results also show that full internalizations of external pesticide costs substantially reduces preferred pesticide applications rates for corn and soybeans as climate change.

Keywords: climate change impacts; pesticide externalities; farm management adaptation; agricultural sector model; welfare maximization; environmental policy analysis; mathematical programming; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fnu.zmaw.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publica ... rs/FNU177_Koleva.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.fnu.zmaw.de:80 (No such host is known. )

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:sgc:wpaper:177

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Uwe Schneider ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).