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G20 Global Land Initiative: Land restoration is an intentional activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with
respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability . There are numerous studies documenting substantial economic, social, and environmental benefits from land restoration . However, despite this, the rate of land degradation remains significantly higher than the rate of land restoration globally. Some of the reasons behind this continued land degradation are well known, such as social and longer-term nature of most land restoration benefits, numerous economic and institutional barriers for land restoration, such as land tenure insecurity, lack of access to funding, lack of extension and rural advisory services, and others. However, there are also numerous examples of communities and countries which achieved significant land restoration successes. This conference provided a valuable opportunity to discuss and exchange about successes and failures of land restoration focusing on the social context, and highlighted solutions and opportunities for successful land restoration.

NBER: We estimate annual discontinuities in remotely-sensed crop yields at all international land borders and link them to changes in the economic freedom index by the Fraser Institute, a country-level measure of institutional quality. Each point of the ten-point index increases the discontinuity by 2.2% over the next five years, highlighting that institutional reforms have the potential to close some of the observed crop yield gap. Three subcategories are consistently significant: credit market regulation, inflation, and the top marginal tax rate. We present suggestive evidence that higher average yields are achieved through increased use of irrigation and mechanization. Yield variability remains unchanged, and reforms lead to cropland expansion through deforestation.

Agricultural Economics: Cluster farming is increasingly recognized as a viable means of improving smallholder economic integration and commercialization in many developing countries. However, little is known about its impact on smallholder welfare and livelihoods. We examine the relationship between cluster farming and smallholder commercialization using a large-scale survey of 3969 farm households in Ethiopia cultivating high-acreage crops such as teff, wheat, maize, barley, and sesame. Using switching regressions and instrumental variable estimators, we show that cluster farming is associated with commercialization measured as commercialization index, market surplus value, and market price. To further deal with endogeneity concerns, we also employ some pseudo-panel models where we observe similar insights. Beyond this, we account for heterogeneities by disaggregating households based on farm scales and crops cultivated. Our findings show that cluster farming is positively associated with commercialization for all farms and crop types despite this disaggregation. However, the related gains are higher among medium and large farms and vary per crop type. These findings imply that cluster farming is crucial in improving smallholder commercialization and may be a critical entry and leveraging point for policy. We thus lend support to initiatives and plans that seek to upscale cluster farming as they can potentially improve smallholder commercialization with ensuing impacts on rural livelihoods and welfare.

Food Policy: Farmers’ behavior towards sustainable agricultural production is key to reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture and conserving biodiversity. We investigate the causal effect of culture on pro-environmental behaviors of farmers, and how policy instruments interact with culture to influence behavior. We exploit a unique natural experiment in Switzerland, which consists of two parts. First, there is an inner-Swiss cultural border between German- and French-speaking farmers who share the same natural environment, economy, and institutions, but differ culturally in their norms and values. Second, we exploit the effects of an agri-environmental policy reform that increased the monetary incentives to enroll land into biodiversity conservation. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design and panel census data of all Swiss farms between 2010 and 2017, we show the following findings: Before the reform, farmers on the French-speaking side of the cultural border systematically enrolled less land into biodiversity conservation, compared to the German-speaking side. With increased monetary incentives following the policy reform in 2014, the French-speaking farmers enrolled relatively more additional land than the German-speaking farmers, shrinking the discontinuity. These findings indicate that while there exist cultural differences in pro-environmental behaviors, increased monetary incentives can reduce the importance of cultural differences. We discuss the implications for policy.

Annual Review of Resource Economics: Restoration of degraded ecosystems is essential for having a stable climate, reducing weather extremes and disease burden, producing enough food to feed growing populations, and generally keeping the world livable. However, we are currently rapidly degrading ecosystems worldwide, thus destroying the very basis of life. There is a major gap between what investments are needed to restore degraded ecosystems and prevent further degradation and what is actually being invested. In addition, most governments are still learning how to design and implement ecosystem restoration policies that are effective and efficient. Ecosystem restoration should be among our main scientific endeavors. This review fills a critical gap in the existing literature by providing a theory-informed understanding of the findings emerging from this highly policy-relevant strand of resource economics. The article also suggests key areas for future research.

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy: Agricultural and other fields of economics have always co-evolved and benefitted from each other's insights. Over time, a general convergence of all social sciences began, and various fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science started to overlap with general and agricultural economics. Within economics, it was especially the rise of behavioral economics, that has steered the field toward the other social sciences. It departs from the assumption of perfectly rational expected utility maximizers and allows for greater diversity in decision-makers' objectives and constraints. Agricultural economics has been early to recognize the need to make economic choice models more realistic. This can be explained by the particularities of agricultural economics and agriculture. Agricultural economists are tasked with solving specific, practical problems, and thus behavioral deviations from model predictions have always been salient and relevant to policy recommendations. Then, farmers—and to some extent also consumers—make choices in particularly complex and uncertain environments and must use all strategic tools at their disposal to deal with their “bounded rationality”. These include the reliance on culture and other heuristics. Agricultural economics continues to synergize economic theory and practice with insights from other disciplines and real-world experiences and is an important driver towards further unification of all social sciences.

European Review of Agricultural Economics: Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are increasingly being employed in agricultural and environmental economics to identify causal effects. Here, we showcase recent applications, identify best practices, discuss commonly invoked identifying assumptions and show how these can be tested. We discuss basic empirical issues and more advanced topics, including how to exploit the availability of panel data, models to explain heterogeneous treatment effects and extrapolation of local estimates. Moreover, we show how agricultural economists can leverage RDD in combination with remote sensing and environmental modelling. Finally, we highlight three areas of emerging opportunities and draw conclusions for research and policy.

Global Environmental Change: There is an urgent need to reduce the environmental risk of pesticide pollution worldwide. We here explore national leverage points, using a novel dataset of 21.4 million georeferenced grid cells and a spatial regression discontinuity design. Our analysis lets us separate how much cross-country differences in the risk of pesticide pollution are caused by differences in countries’ agricultural systems and policies and how much is explained by other factors, such as environmental differences between the countries for example (e.g. pest pressures). We estimate that a third of the global cross-country differences in the pesticide pollution risk are caused by differences in countries’ agricultural systems and policies. The main explanations, and thus leverage points for policies, are differences in countries’ pesticide regulations, their share of organic farming, and type of crops that are grown. We find a trade-off between pesticide pollution risk and soil erosion only in the Americas and in Asia, but not elsewhere, and we do not find a trade-off between pesticide pollution risk and crop yield gaps.

Ecological Economics: Countries' agricultural systems have an important impact on biodiversity, for example bird populations. Here, we estimate such impacts by exploiting a natural experiment in the middle of Europe, where there is a naturally homogenous area that is divided into three countries: Switzerland, Germany, and France. These countries have markedly different agricultural systems and policies. Using a methodologically unified and unusually rich bird dataset available across these borders, both for the 2010s and 1990s, we analyze (a) whether there is a clear pattern that bird diversity systematically changes when crossing these borders and (b) whether this has changed over time. To assess bird populations, we focus on Shannon diversity, species richness and number of territories, as well as the individual effect on 29 common bird species. We find that Switzerland has systematically smaller and less diverse bird populations compared to Germany and France, driven entirely by agricultural differences. At the same time, we find that the difference between the countries was considerably more pronounced in the 1990s than in the 2010s. Yet, to reach the bird friendliness of Switzerland's neighboring countries, additional policy effort seems required, for example in the form of targeted agri-environmental payments.

Journal of Agricultural Economics: We test and quantify the (in)stability of farmer risk preferences, accounting for both the instability across elicitation methods and instability over time. We use repeated measurements (N = 1530) with Swiss fruit and grapevine producers over 3 years, using different risk preference elicitation methods (domain-specific self-assessment and incentivised lotteries). We find that farmers' risk preferences change considerably when measured using different methods. For example, self-reported risk preference and findings from a Holt and Laury lottery correlate only weakly (correlation coefficients range from 0.06 to 0.23). Moreover, we also find that risk preferences vary considerably over time, that is, applying the same elicitation method to the same farmer in a different point in time results in different risk preference estimates. Our results show self-reported risk preferences are moderately correlated (correlation coefficients range from 0.42 to 0.55) from one year to another. Finally, we find experiencing crop damages due to climate extremes and pests is associated with farmers becoming more risk tolerant over time in specific domains.