Rural Land Use: Traditional Agriculture or Forestry?

Abstract

The signing of the Kyoto Protocol and the official recognition of forestry’s capacity to sequester carbon has prompted considerable interest, within the European Union, in forestry as a competing land use application. However, despite large increases in grants to forestry, afforestation rates, in certain EU countries, are below national targets. In this paper, we employ a real options model to theoretically explain why farmers may be slow to switch land from traditional agriculture to forestry. The theoretical model is then used to motivate an empirical dynamic panel data model and both models are applied to Irish data.