2002 World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists

Increased public demand has led to new markets for alternative food commodities. These allow farmers to use production systems that are less intensive than conventional, such as raising animals in ways that give them more freedom to exercise normal behaviour. A higher willingness to pay for these commodities may be due to a perception of higher food quality, but may also depend on other factors such as concerns for the environment, health and animal welfare aspects. Thus the public may be willing to pay not only for benefits that accrue directly to themselves (e.g. better meat) but also to prevent perceived harm to animals. Within the European Union legislation has been the main means to ensure a certain standard of farm animal production. The use of legislation implies that there may be a market failure. From an economic point of view, how do we know when to use legislation and when to allow a market solution? We analyze this theoretically and apply our results at the production of eggs, battery-cage versus free-range. Conducting two CVM-surveys, two lessons are learned; 1) Previous estimations of the benefits of legislation may be too large, 2) It is possible to design CVM-surveys to avoid many of the alleged problems.



	Paper Title:	Exploring Nonmarket Values For The Social Impact Of Farm Animal Welfare Legislation
	Presenting Author:	Peter Frykblom (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
	Coauthor 1:	Johan Andersson
	Coauthor 2:
	Coauthor 3:
	Abstract:	Increased public demand has led to new markets for alternative food commodities. These allow farmers to use production systems that are less intensive than conventional, such as raising animals in ways that give them more freedom to exercise normal behaviour. A higher willingness to pay for these commodities may be due to a perception of higher food quality, but may also depend on other factors such as concerns for the environment, health and animal welfare aspects. Thus the public may be willing to pay not only for benefits that accrue directly to themselves (e.g. better meat) but also to prevent perceived harm to animals. Within the European Union legislation has been the main means to ensure a certain standard of farm animal production. The use of legislation implies that there may be a market failure. From an economic point of view, how do we know when to use legislation and when to allow a market solution? We analyze this theoretically and apply our results at the production of eggs, battery-cage versus free-range. Conducting two CVM-surveys, two lessons are learned; 1) Previous estimations of the benefits of legislation may be too large, 2) It is possible to design CVM-surveys to avoid many of the alleged problems.
	Link to paper:	Not available

	Session / Day / Time	1H / Monday / 8:00 - 10:00 am

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