2024/05 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
Towards sustainable agriculture: behaviors, spatial dynamics and policy in an evolutionary agent-based model |
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Matteo Coronese, Martina Occelli, Francesco Lamperti and Andrea Roventini |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Agriculture; Land use; Agent-based model; Technological change; Transition; Environmental boundaries; Sustainability
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
C63, Q10, Q15, Q16, Q18, Q50, Q55
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
Economic and population growth increasingly pressure the Earth
system. Fertile soils are essential to ensure global food security,
requiring high-yielding agro-technological regimes to cope with rising
soil degradation and macro-nutrients deficiencies, which may be
further exacerbated by climate change. In this work, we extend the
AgriLOVE land-use agent-based model (Coronese et al., 2023) to
investigate trade-offs in the transition between conventional and
sustainable farming regimes in a smallholder economy exposed to
explicit environmental boundaries. We investigate the ability of the
system to favor a sustainable transition when prolonged conventional
farming leads to soil depletion. First, we showcase the emergence of
three endogenous scenarios of transition and lock-in. Then, we analyze
transition dynamics under several behavioral, environmental and policy
scenarios. Our results highlights a strong path-dependence of the
agricultural sector, with scarce capacity to foster successful
transitions to a sustainable regime in absence of external
interventions. The role of behavioral changes is limited and we find
evidence of negative tipping points induced by mismanagement of
grassland and forests. These findings call for policies strongly
supporting sustainable agriculture. We test regulatory measures aimed
at protecting common environmental goods and public incentives to
encourage the search for novel production techniques targeted at
closing the sustainable-conventional yield gap. We find that their
effectiveness is highly time-dependent, with rapidly closing windows
of opportunity.
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