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Methods and evidence for economic valuation of agricultural non-commodity outputs and suggestions to facilitate its application

La agricultura se concibe como una actividad multifuncional que incluye no sólo la producción de alimentos sino también la protección del ambiente, el uso de la tierra, la creación de empleo, entre otras. El presente artículo de revision y el siguiente analizan los métodos de valoración de la producción agrícola que no corresponde a comodities, centralizados en la Unión Europea.

Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 120 (2007) 5–20 
Livia Madureira, Tina Rambonilaza, Isabella Karpinski

Economic valuation provides information for the relative values of environmental and recreational spatial services and other goods such as healthy and safe food, whose promotion is now envisaged by EU in the context of a multifunctional agriculture (MFA) model. Therefore, economic valuation is a valuable tool for MFA assessment. However, the promotion of MFA at EU level necessitates the scaling up of assessment methods, particularly if the corresponding policies are to receive a sympathetic hearing by the WTO. Thus, the usefulness of economic valuation in the MFA context depends on its ability to obtain scaled-up estimates. This paper is a review of the current state of the art for the agricultural non-commodity outputs valuation methods, their application and respective value estimates. A special focus has been given to the European countries of France, Germany and Portugal, because these were the object of a relatively detailed and extensive survey of case-studies addressing valuation of agriculture-related NCOs (non-commodity outputs), undertaken in the MULTAGRI project. The main conclusions of the review were: (1) the prevalence of stated preference valuation methods; (2) the resort to crudely defined ‘‘landscapes’’ to index spatial-based environmental and recreational services; (3) the regional scope of valuation studies; (4) that most of the case-studies offered ex ante value estimates for actual or simulated changes in the provision level of agriculture-related NCOs, linked to conservation or restoration policies, projects or programmes. Furthermore, the review highlights some promising practices to improve the selection and specification of attributes, such as the option for a multi-attribute valuation approach and the resort to multidisciplinary data and modelling.These practices have been incorporated into a proposal for an integrative valuation framework to improve NCO specification at the broader scale and to respond to the end-users information demands.