This is not a farmer. Conformation to European statistical standards and the delimitation of social groups in Romania

Antoine Roger

As a member of the European Union since 2007, Romania is expected to produce statistical data conform to the European Commission’s standards. Agriculture is put under a close scrutiny, as about 4 thousand Romanians live from such an occupation. Most of these producers are petty landowners who get a small plot as a result of the decollectivization process and use it for subsistence farming, aside from national economic networks. Worked out by the European Commission, the Farm Accountancy Data Network is meant to assess the “economic dimension” of farms. Its units of measurement are used by the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture as a support for promoting a legitimate model of farming. Farmers who do not exceed a given threshold are considered unfit for a commercial activity and expected to quit. Agricultural policies are meant to help those who are just reaching the expected economic dimension to extend their smallholding and switch to intensive farming. Hence, the “semi-subsistence” farming is coined as a new category and becomes the main focus of reforms and subsidies. However, it proves inefficient as the agrarian structure keeps a strong inertia. Our case study shed the light on some limitations of the performative power exerted by numbers : it proves that European statistics are effective only when national administrations use them as means to strengthen established categories.

The choice of emission indicators in environmental policy design: An analysis of GHG abatement in different dairy farms based on a bio-economic model approach

Bernd Lengers, Wolfgang Britz

The application of economic instruments to GHG emissions from dairy farms needs to rely on GHG indicators as actual emissions are impossible or extremely costly to measure. The choice of indicator impacts chosen abatement options, related costs and GHG actually emitted. A tool to quantify these relations is proposed which at its core consists of a highly detailed, mixed-integer dynamic programming model template able to cover a wide range of dairy farm characteristics and promising indicators. It allows deriving and comparing marginal abatement costs of GHGs emission for different farm types and indicators, informing the policy process about promising indicators, abatement strategies and related abatement and measurement costs.

Mobilizations and local facilitations towards the reducing use of pesticides: Incentives strategies targeting farmers in the Paris area

Aurélie Cardona, Claire Lamine, François Hochereau

In a context where the current system of crop protection is strongly criticized, various actors (both from the agricultural and the non agricultural world) are getting mobilized towards pesticide reduction. A diversity of incentive strategies are emerging to encourage changes in farming practices. We analyze three case studies in the greater Paris area to understand the forms of argumentation and the incentive strategies of local facilitators to encourage transitions towards sustainable practices. Thus, we show the diversity and the evolution of the forms of advisor services. Then we analyze the effects of these incentive strategies. Do they lead to a greening or to an ecologization of farming practices?

Determinants of diffusion and adoption of improved technology for rice parboiling in Benin

Lidia Dandedjrohoun, Aliou Diagne, Gauthier Biaou, Simon N'Cho, Soul-Kifouly Midingoyi

The widespread use of traditional rice-parboiling methods in Benin leads to poor quality of final rice. To address this problem, the national agricultural research institute of Benin and Africa Rice Center have developed improved rice parboiling technology. An educational video developed by AfricaRice was used for it diffusion. Women have expressed high interest in the use of the technology and have reported that it helps increase the quality of their final rice despite it relatively high cost. This paper uses the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) framework and data collected from 200 women rice parboilers in, central Benin to estimate the actual and potential adoption rates of this technology and the determinants of its diffusion and adoption. Eighty-five percent of the sampled women were exposed to the technology in 2008. With this incomplete diffusion, the actual adoption rate is 67%, whereas the potential adoption rate is estimated to 75%. “Being member of a parboilers association’’ and “Participation in video training” are positively associated with knowledge and adoption of this technology. This indicates that support and promotion of women parboilers associations is a means to favor increase technology uptake and access and video-supported training is an extension tool to trigger favor agricultural technology awareness and adoption.

The Determinants of Firm Exit in the French Food Industries

Jean-Pierre Huiban, Pierre Blanchard, Claude Mathieu

A semi-parametric approach is used to estimate the firm propensity to exit. The unobserved individual productivity of firm is first estimated, using the Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006) approach, then introduced as determinant of firm exit next to other variables, including the firm’s level of sunk costs and the industry concentration as expected barriers to exit. By using an unbalanced panel of 5849 firms in French food industries from 1996 to 2002, we find a significantly negative relationship between the probability of exit of the firm and its individual efficiency and age. Beyond those well-known results, we also show that the amount of sunk costs may be an important barrier to exit. By the end, the relationship between the propensity to exit and the industry level of concentration is affected by a turning point: the relationship is first an increasing one and then becomes decreasing after.

Restructuring farmers' solidarities in The Netherlands: Ecologising of practices or public management reforms?

François-Joseph Daniel

In light of the powerful increase in environmental regulations in the past 20 years, the interdependent arrangements among professional farmers are undergoing important reforms. In the Netherlands, these restructurings have given rise to new locally-based organizations – the “environmental cooperatives”. These transformations can be explained both by the dynamic of ecologising the practices that encourage agricultural organizations to review their initial projects, and by the State’s public management reforms that stimulate the construction of new underlying principles among professional associations. These new forms of associative unity, induced by the nature protection policies, mark a historical shift in the management of the agricultural sector. They attest to a certain decrease in professional autonomy, and to the institution of a professionnalism constructed “from above” at the heart of which the farmers have less control over their working conditions.

Sociability is no more what it was…

Sophie Bobbé, Martyne Perrot

What does sociability mean today in a village? Is it still local? Has it been really local once? How do associative networks use, produce and reinvent the sociability in a village? Do they bring new places of sociability on the foreground? Which territories do they build? To respond all these questions, we study the cultural associations in Aubrac and Millevaches and make appear the determinant factors of the sociability among the population: the existence of old networks like the ‘amicales’, the professional and social composition of the population, the presence or not of neo-rural people, the local history and its reception outside of the local area. In conclusion, one question raises: Should we rather talk of local sociability or of a permanent recycling of local motives matched by loan and supposing ceaseless cultural transfers?

Sanitary and phytosanitary standards: Does consumers’ health protection justify developing countries’ producers’ exclusion?

Cristina Grazia, Abdelhakim Hammoudi, Oualid Hamza

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects public regulatory tools for food safety, notably maximum admitted contamination thresholds and official controls performed at importing country’s borders on both developing countries’ market access and consumers’ health. An Industrial Economics approach is developed that endogenizes the sanitary risk associated with imports by explicitly taking into account the interaction between the public regulatory tools and the strategic response of producers/exporters. Producers’ strategic reaction is shown to crucially depend on the characteristics of the economic environment. Moreover, a regulatory reinforcement may exacerbate producers/exporters exclusion without improving consumers’ health protection.