In this paper, we assess to what extent pesticide price can be used to bring about more sustainable agricultural practices in field crop farms. We use an innovative three-step nonparametric frontier approach to simulate price increases that would persuade “rational” farmers to adopt practices that use the smallest possible amount of pesticides while still enabling them to continue to produce the same output, given the current production technology. The procedure is based on a data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimation of the production technology. The result suggests that very large price changes are necessary to bring about fairly small change of the quantity of pesticide used, thus challenging the efficacy of price as a policy tool in the short run. Consequently, managing pesticide is likely to require a multi-channel procedure, as prices appear not to be a fully effective instrument. Since the short-run demand structure for pesticides seems to be inelastic, a clear communication of the long-run objective is desirable if not essential for any policy to be implemented.

在本文中，我们评估了农药价格在多大程度上可用于在田间作物农场实现更可持续的农业实践。我们使用创新的三步非参数前沿方法来模拟价格上涨，这将说服“理性”农民采用使用​​尽可能少的农药量的做法，同时根据当前的生产技术，仍然能够使他们继续生产相同的产量。该过程基于生产技术的数据包络分析（DEA）估计。结果表明，非常大的价格变化对于使所使用农药数量的变化非常小是必要的，因此短期内挑战了价格作为政策工具的有效性。因此，农药管理可能需要多渠道的程序，因为价格似乎并不是一个完全有效的工具。由于对农药的短期需求结构似乎缺乏弹性，因此，如果对实施任何政策都不重要，则需要就长期目标进行明确的沟通。