IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-02798644.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Improving Farm Environmental Performance through Technical Assistance : Empirical Evidence from Pesticide Use

Author

Listed:
  • Margaux Lapierre

    (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier)

  • Julie Subervie

    (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier)

  • Alexandre Sauquet

    (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier)

Abstract

The Ecophyto plan is a high stake program implemented in France since 2008 with the aim to halve pesticides use in the farming sector in 10 years. The main disposal of the program is the dephy network. It consists in providing technical assistance to groups of volunteer farms. The French government is currently trying to scale-up the program, which calls for the evaluation of its impacts on pesticide use and yields. Coupling Dephy data and national surveys from 2010 to 2016, we use a slate of quasi-experimental approaches - Matching, Difference-in-difference matching, and Difference-in-difference - to estimate the impact of participation in the program on pesticide use and crop yields on enrolled vineyards. We find that participants have achieved reductions in pesticide use that ranges from 10~to 30~percent, thanks to the program. We moreover find that the reduction in the use of chemicals was accompanied by an increase in the use of biocontrol products. Finally, we find that this change of practices resulted in a reduction in yields for only a fraction of enrolled farms. Our study provides new evidence regarding the effectiveness of technical assistance alone in reducing pesticide use among French farmers, and presumably among farmers in developed countries more generally. It shed lights on potential beneficial impacts as well as warnings of the effects of such programs.

Suggested Citation

  • Margaux Lapierre & Julie Subervie & Alexandre Sauquet, 2019. "Improving Farm Environmental Performance through Technical Assistance : Empirical Evidence from Pesticide Use," Post-Print hal-02798644, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02798644
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rose Deperrois & Adélaïde Fadhuile & Julie Subervie, 2023. "Social Learning for the Green Transition Evidence from a Pesticide Reduction Policy," Working Papers 2023-06, Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL).
    2. repec:ags:aaea22:335538 is not listed on IDEAS

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02798644. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.