NANCY Seminar – Céline NAUGES (TSE, INRAE)

Event details :

Title: Self insurance and self protection in pest management: The role of subjective risk

Abstract: One possible mechanism to induce farmers to reduce their dependence on, and use of, pesticides is the adoption of preventive practices, that is, agronomic practices such as soil preparation and crop diversification or associations, that impede or reduce the development of pests. The use of self-protection measures, by lowering the probability of pest attacks, should induce farmers to reduce their use of pesticides. In this article, we study farmers’ decisions to adopt preventive practices and its implication on pesticide use, in a context of uncertainty and risk, using data from a primary survey of wheat growers from France. We present a theoretical model that describes farmers’ sequential decision-making. We then test a number of hypotheses using primary survey data and run some simulations to try and disentangle the role of objective vs. subjective risk in relation to the use of agronomic practices as self-protection measures and the subsequent use of pesticides.