The paper aims to study the effects of reducing pesticide use by farmers in the arable sector in France
and the feasibility of a policy target of reducing pesticide use by half. The originality of the approach
is to combine statistical data and expert knowledge to describe low-input alternative techniques at the
national level. These data are used in a mathematical programming model to simulate the effect on
land use, production and farmers’ income of achieving different levels of pesticide reduction. The
results show that reducing pesticide use by 30% could be possible without reducing farmers’ income.
We also estimate the levels of tax on pesticides necessary to achieve different levels of reduction of
pesticide use and the effect of an incentive mechanism combining a pesticide tax with subsidies for
low-input techniques.
