How does crop insurance influence pesticide use? Evidence from French farms

The purpose of this paper is to examine how crop insurance influences pesticide use, the two decisions being strategic for risk management at the farm scale. To that aim, the paper implements propensity score matching, difference-in-differences models, and a combination of these two methods in order to compare two similar populations of insured and non-insured farmers. Using data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), we consider French farms which cultivate field crops and quality winegrowing, the two main productions that participate the most to crop insurance and that use intensively pesticides. The analysis is performed between 2008 and 2012 given a strategic change in the crop insurance system in 2010 that strongly incites farmers to purchase crop insurance with private companies. At the same time, pesticide use was progressively discouraged through public policies. Estimations show that while pesticide use decreases for all crops, the purchase of crop insurance policies has no impact for field crops and quality wine-growing. Meanwhile, the land allocated to each crop within the farm changes. These results question a possible substitutability, for some productions, between crop insurance and pesticides as risk management tools.