Speaker
Description
Reconciling agricultural production with environmental preservation is one of the most challenging issues in the agricultural sector. We address this issue by considering two strategies for land management: ‘land sharing’ and ‘land sparing’. Taking into account farm categories, we use an efficiency analysis utilising the DEA method to measure the potential for implementing these two strategies. Fam categories are defined according to two criteria: the level of agricultural land productivity measured by the yield index and the level of subsidies received by farms. Applied to farm data from the Meuse department for the period 2006–2016, the results show that agricultural production can be reconciled with environmental preservation by sparing 16 % of farmland for the environment or by reducing the use intensity of intermediate inputs by 13 % on all farmlands. Considering our farm categorisation, regarding the criterion of land productivity, our findings suggest that land sparing would be more appropriate for less productive farms and land sharing for more productive farms; regarding the level of subsidies, both land sparing and land sharing would be more appropriate for large farms that receive less subsidies. The more farms increase in size and receive subsidies, the less they contribute to the two strategies. Our results underline the importance of considering farms’ characteristics in implementing an agricultural land management strategy for environmental preservation.
| Keywords | Agricultural production, environmental preservation, land sharing, land sparing, Data Envelopment Analysis method |
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