While initially conceived to address requisites for future global sustenance, poverty alleviation, and ecological preservation, agroeconomic models have also been utilized to inform decisions concerning conservation prioritization. The purpose of my first project is twofold. First, I will identify agroeconomic models’ main assumptions, weaknesses, and omitted variables in their depictions of rural lives. This will allow us to comprehend why conservation strategies may not always align with local realities and politics. I will analyze how, where, and why the problems are essential for more effective conservation prioritization.
Second, I will suggest what might be done to correct the defects to minimize problems resulting in unfavorable and unfair plans for conservation prioritization. For instance, conservation prioritization exercises use agroeconomic models in order to compute and minimize the opportunity cost of conservation in terms of forgone benefits from agricultural activities (see, for instance, Duarte et al 2023). While agroeconomic models have a rich, heterogeneous structure in terms of regions, crops, and land types, they assume a representative producer. We would like to explore deviations from that assumption, including farms of different sizes. This additional heterogeneity would allow us to study the welfare effects of conservation policies on different groups of farmers, which is one of the concerns of the CONDJUST project. Small farmers who lack access to capital are less likely to produce high yields of commercially valuable crops. Nonetheless, smallholder farming systems, which are predominant in the Global South, rely on diverse crops and land uses, often for subsistence production and/or as their only source of income. Additionally, including small farming might be essential to determining the conservation priorities themselves, as recent research has suggested that smaller farms tend to be less harmful to biodiversity (Ricardi et al 2021).