Managing Increasing Environmental Risks Through Agro-Biodiversity and Agri-Environmental Policies

Abstract

Agro-biodiversity can provide natural insurance to risk-averse farmers by reducing the variance of crop yield, and to society at large by reducing the uncertainty in the provision of public-good ecosystem services such as e.g. CO2 storage. We analyze the choice of agro-biodiversity by risk-averse farmers who have access to financial insurance, and study the implications for agri-environmental policy design when on-farm agro-biodiversity generates a positive risk externality. While increasing environmental risk leads private farmers to increase their level of on-farm agro-biodiversity, the level of agro-biodiversity in the laissez-faire equilibrium remains inefficiently low. We show how either one of two agri-environmental policy instruments can cure this risk-related market failure: an ex-ante Pigouvian subsidy on on-farm agro-biodiversity and an ex-post payment-by-result for the actual provision of public environmental benefits. In the absence of regulation, welfare may increase rather than decrease with increasing environmental risk, if the agro-ecosystem is characterized by a high natural insurance function, low costs and large external benefits of agro-biodiversity.