How Do We Evaluate And Give Economical Values To Organic Farming And Food Externalities?

Summary

In addition to producing food, farming also generates negative externalities (costs) or positive externalities (benefits or amenities) that financial markets do not take into account. These externalities have taken more and more importance in social expectations. Several public tools tend to take them into account, and market initiatives tend also to reveal them and give them value. The question of quantifying externalities of organic farming (OF) is an old one. There has been numerous papers in different countries producing multi-criteria assessment. Nevertheless very few of them have tried to give economical values to these externalities in the context of promoting new tools in the future CAP, namely payment for environmental services.Our methodology consisted in identifying, qualifying, quantifying and assigning economic values, when possible, for environmental and social externalities differentials between OF and conventional farming (CF).Our results show that OF generates positive externalities differentials on very large items, with a few points to improve, and a concerning point about productivity that impacts some indicators like land use. This analysis gives not only a summary of established knowledge but also identifies points where knowledge gaps need to be filled or which are controversial, and points methodological difficulties, in particular i) the use of a conventional repository, which evolves, and which can be very territorial dependent, but also ii) the difficulty of establishing causalities between practices and ecosystems services’ bouquets, and iii) the problem of payment levels for farmer’s practices when the services improvement can be a result of practices’ management at different scales.