an article by Simon Bordenave (AgroParisTech, INRA, Paris, France) published in International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology Volume 14 Number 3 (2018)
Abstract
The development of more productive varieties has been at the core of the transformations of agriculture and its environmental impacts throughout the 20th century. Among the various environmental effects of agriculture, the ability to choose between wide, low-intensity agriculture, and concentrated, high-intensity one, is a crucial component of its impact on biodiversity conservation.
The impact of an innovation on land use and intensity of agriculture is thus an important determinant of its environmental footprint. The existing literature has studied how innovation modifies land use, but has not focused on how it changes production intensity.
The objective of this paper is to complement the existing analytical framework to account for the impact of varieties improvements on non-land inputs. It shows that innovation can simultaneously reduce land use and increase agricultural intensity only if it is biased towards one of these production factors, demand is elastic and production factors are hardly substitutable.
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