INNOVATION RIGIDITY AND ECOLOGICAL- ECONOMIC RECONCILIATION IN AGRICULTURE

Abstract — For several decades, significant changes in bird biodiversity have been reported, especially in Europe. Agriculture, and more specifically agricultural intensification, is a major driver of these modifications. Taking into account these environmental impacts, agriculture nowadays aims at a more sustainable way of producing which would reconcile its economic and ecological functions. The objective of this paper is to give insights into the impact of public policies and financial incentives on both the conservation of biodiversity and farming production. We therefore develop a macro-regional model combining a community dynamics of 65 bird species impacted by agricultural land-use and an economic decision model for each French region. The ecological dynamic model is calibrated with the STOC (Time Survey of Common Birds) and AGRESTE (French land-uses) databases while the economic model relies on the optimization of the gross margin of the RICA (Network of Agricultural Accountant Information). We investigate different scenarios based on subsidies and taxes to study the impact of public policies on both biodiversity and agricultural economics. We show that simple economic instruments could be used to establish scenarios promoting economic performance and bird populations. The bio-economical analysis shows several solutions for the ecology-economy trade-off. These results suggest that many possibilities are available to develop multi-functional sustainable agriculture. We focus here on the impact of the innovation rigidity and we show that a too big innovation ability is not necessary favourable to the biodiversity because of the inertia of the biological systems