Halving the European farm uses of pesticides: looking for alternative technologies

With the Green Deal roadmap, the European Union aims to half the uses and risks of pesticides by the end of this decade. The European Commission (EC) claims that the proposal for pesticides will not disrupt European agri-food production and price. The EC argues that previous assessments of the roadmap provide an upper limit to the effects of the proposal, mostly by ignoring alternative production techniques that rely on integrated pest management principles. Our paper first explains that the general equilibrium approach applied by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) does correctly capture these alternatives, measured implicitly in econometric studies on the price inelasticity of pesticide use. Second, we show that the USDA study significantly underestimates the negative effects of the proposal in terms of agri-food production due to the input taxes rebated as output subsidies. Finally, we show that the underestimation is robust to the other arguments raised by the EC.