Land-sparing vs land-sharing with incomplete policies[Rethinking the causes of deforestation: lessons from economic models]

This article analyses the trade-off between yield and farmed area when a valuable species is affected by agricultural practices. It revisits, from an economic perspective, the ‘land-sparing versus land-sharing’ debate. We show that the optimal yield is either increasing or decreasing with respect to the value of the species. Land-sparing and land-sharing are not necessarily antagonistic; for a sufficiently elastic demand function, both the optimal yield and the farmed area decrease with the public value of the species. A general assessment of a second-best policy is performed, and several particular policies are considered.