The technical and economic effects of biodiversity standards on wheat production

Abstract

Our paper assesses the technical and economic effects of adopting environmental standards aimed at favouring biodiversity on wheat production. We consider two standards with different levels of environmental stringency. We use data on French wheat production at the plot level from the period 2014–2020. We implement an endogenous switching regression model taking into account two sources of endogeneity, environmental standards adoption and inputs quantity use. Our results indicate that adopting the more stringent standard slightly decreases wheat yield and quality. In contrast, it induces a low increase in wheat price. The price premium of the more stringent environmental standard merely compensates for the negative effect of the standard’s adoption on quality.