Crop-Livestock Farming Systems Assessment in Europe

We have seen that integration of crops and livestock at farm level leads to better environmental performances by decreasing the negative environmental externalities and/or by increasing the positive ones.

But farmers are generally economically rational when they seek to improve productivity, especially labour productivity with intensification rather than increasing autonomy or crop-livestock integration. In most of the cases, they are used to responding to market signals under given policy set of measures.

So, a question can be answered: what could happen with other signals? Giving some monetary value to environmental externalities would be able to modify preferences between production systems or ways to produce ?

One way is to explore the possibility to give monetary values to environmental externalities: negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emission, acidification, eutrophication... as well as positive externalities like biodiversity, landscape maintenance, carbon capture...

More than the classical instruments for economists such as taxes and subsidies, monetarisation of ecological externalities is able to bring virtue into the market. A first trial done in Cantogether (not presented here) has shown that it is possible. But it needs:

• to define principles on effects like neutrality on costs or transferring a share of environmental costs to consumers;

• to implement the system at least at the whole European level, with a border protection against the competition of other regions, or at the global level;

• to check and refine the chosen technical and economic parameters;

• to experiment and model the system on different cases.