Impacts of agricultural land use changes on pesticide use in French agriculture

Public policies seeking to regulate pesticide use must be based on a clear identification of the factors influencing such use. Since the agricultural use of pesticides is primarily crop-dependent, agricultural land use change is potentially an important driver of the overall level of pesticide use in a given country. In this paper, we investigate the influence of agricultural land use changes on pesticide use in French agriculture over the period 1989-2013, during which important changes in the Common Agricultural Policy took place. Toward that end, we developed a method allowing the direct effects of agricultural land use changes to be disentangled from other factors affecting the intensity of pesticide use. On the basis of standard protection programs defined by crop protection experts,a fixed pesticide use intensity is estimated for 19 annual and perennial crops representing 90% of French arable land area and the bulk of pesticide use in French agriculture. These coefficients, combined with national agricultural land use statistics, are used to construct an artificial index of pesticide use in France whose variations depend solely on changes in agricultural land use. This index is calculated over the period 1989-2013. Our results indicate that the direct impacts of agricultural land use changes on pesticide use in France have varied depending on the time period considered, reflecting the influence of public regulations, notably the compulsory set-aside policy in force during the 1990s, and market conditions, particularly the context of high prices for cereal grains at the end of the 2000s. Over the six years from 2008 to 2013, this index is roughly constant, indicating that the 17% increase in French pesticide use in 2013 compared to 2008 (as assessed from annual pesticide sales) cannot be even partially attributed to agricultural land use changes. Since 2000, land use changes mainly corresponded to substitutions between crops with similar per-hectare pesticide use intensities, and/or to substitutions with counterbalancing impacts on these intensities. A prospective approach shows that other types of land use changes (e.g. a massive conversion of grassland to arable land or, conversely, a strong diversification of arable crop rotations), could have much higher impacts on pesticide use, with the effect of either offsetting or reinforcing efforts to reduce pesticide use intensity in arable crops. Thus, better coordination is needed between public policies aimed at regulating pesticide use and public policies influencing land use. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.