How to reconcile agricultural production with environmental preservation through an efficiency analysis: Land sparing versus Land sharing?

Abtract:
Reconciling agricultural production with environmental preservation is one of the main challenging issues in the agricultural sector. We addressed this issue through the implementation of two strategies of land management: the land sharing and the land sparing strategies. We used efficiency analysis with DEA Method to measure the potential for implementing these two strategies taking into account farm categories. These categories were made following two criteria: the criterion of agricultural land productivity and the criterion of production structure. With an application on farm data of the Meuse Department over the period 2014-2016, results show that agricultural production can be reconciled with environmental preservation by sparing 25% of agricultural land for environmental preservation in the land sparing strategy, or by reducing agricultural intensity by 26% on all agricultural land in the land sharing strategy. Considering farms’ categories, our findings suggested that the land sparing would be more appropriate for less productive farms and land sharing for more productive farms with the criterion of land productivity. And with the criterion of production structure, the land sparing would be more appropriate for farms less dominated by livestock, and the land sharing for farms more dominated by livestock. Our results underline the importance of taking into account farms’ characteristics in implementing an agricultural land management strategy for environmental preservation.