Séminaire Nancy – Guy Meunier (INRAE)

Détails de l'événement :

“Livestock regulation, land use and greenhouse gas mitigation : an analysis of second-best policies” with Maxence Gérard et Stéphane De Cara

Abstract: Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the livestock sector may require to act both at the extensive margin (by reducing the quantity of meat) and at the intensive margin (by changing animal feeding towards less land-intensive feed). The land area freed by these options could then possibly be used to sequester carbon. We develop a stylized partial-equilibrium model of the beef sector that accounts for direct emissions from animals, as well as for feed and land-use related emissions. We study the welfare impacts of the first-best Pigouvian price instrument, which would consist of taxing all emission sources and rewarding all carbon sinks and compare this situation to that obtained under three more realistic second-best instruments: a tax on meat consumption, a technical standard, and a subsidy to land set aside for natural forest regeneration. We show that the optimal tax on meat consumption should integrate the carbon opportunity cost of land use. This instrument performs well if mitigation through intensification is costly on the supply-side. A technical standard does not sufficiently trigger demand reduction and offers therefore a limited efficiency. A subsidy to land set aside has the advantage to both reduce meat consumption and trigger intensification. The model is then calibrated on French data and simulations show that the subsidy dominates the meat tax and the technical standard for a large set of parameter values. However, the efficiency of the subsidy is sensitive to the relative level of carbon sequestration potential of natural reserves compared to grassland soils.