Recent work has highlighted agricultural land conversion as a significant debit in the greenhouse gas accounting of ethanol as an alternative fuel. This work has at the same time sparked considerable debate on the role of crop yield growth as a means of avoiding rapid land conversion. We examine the agricultural land use impacts of mandate driven ethanol demand increases in the United States in a formal economic equilibrium framework which allows us to examine the importance of yield price relationships. We find that the standard assumption of trend yield growth is likely restrictive for analysis of equilibrium response to significant demand increases for fuel feedstocks. Furthermore, we identify both the acreage response and bilateral trade specification of a multi-country model as important sources of variability (in terms of parametric uncertainty) in predicting global land use change from the biofuels boom.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University in its series GTAP Working Papers with number
2810.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)