Estimating the Supply of Environmental Benefits by Agriculture: A French Case Study

There has been an increasing public interest in promoting the supply of environmental benefits by agriculture. The Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme addresses this challenge by offering farmers voluntary agreements: entrants are compensated for complying with a package of prescribed farming practices designed to secure conservation goals. This paper emphasizes the uptake of agreements from two perspectives: (i) ex post, it considers why some eligible farmers join a proposed scheme and why some do not, (ii) ex ante, it discusses how non-eligible farmers would behave if they were proposed a well-defined scheme. Ex post perspective refers to farmers' actual behaviour which is observed by the environmental agency, whereas the ex ante perspective is related to their contingent one. A single economic model is derived to deal with both cases. Econometric results from a French case study with respect to wetland preservation are given. There is some consistency between the empirical results obtained in both cases, and to some extent it may be argued that contingent behaviour predicts the actual one.