ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes a methodology for quantifying the economic and environmental impacts of trade and related policies in agriculture that accounts for the location-specific relationships between agricultural production and the environment, and illustrates this methodology in an Andean case study. It addresses the problem of providing scientifically valid empirical foundations to analysis of the aggregate environmental impacts of policy changes, such as trade liberalization. The chapter outlines the conceptual framework at the disaggregate level where the relevant scientific disciplines can be integrated, and then describes the problems that arise in statistical aggregation for policy analysis. It illustrates the use of the approach in a case study of the effects of trade liberalization on pesticide use in the Andean region. The chapter concludes with some observations about the data needed to develop the empirical foundations for environment-trade linkages.