Revisiting the economic valuation of agricultural losses due to large-scale changes in pollinator populations

Abstract

We discuss comparative static partial equilibrium approaches for large-scale monetary valuations of animal-mediated crop pollination. These approaches rely upon reported crop production values, own-price elasticities of demand and experimentally found dependence ratios that express crop-specific yield shares due to pollinators. We dismiss the established long-term approach given the difficulty of anticipating the adaptation of the bioeconomic system to changes of pollinator abundance. Instead, we suggest another more parsimonious method, which assesses the short-term welfare effects following a sudden change in pollinator abundance. Using 2016-2018 data on agricultural production, we estimate the worldwide welfare effects due to a pollinator collapse for a range of plausible own-price elasticities, both from short-term and long-term perspectives. For the former we also simulate a global recovery scenario. Depending on the overall price elasticity assumed, the short-term effects of a total pollinator loss lie between 1 and 2 % of global GDP. We also apply the different valuation approaches to more detailed German 2006-2016 crop production data, where we account for crop-specific demand. As the reported dependence ratios vary in wide ranges, we rely upon stochastic simulations to obtain likely distributions of the German welfare effects.