Compensation Payments and Animal Disease: Incentivising Farmers Both to Undertake Costly On-farm Biosecurity and to Comply with Disease Reporting Requirements

• Agricultural Economics Workshop

Date and Location

Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 12:10 PM - 1:30 PM
ARE Conference Room, 2102 Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of compensation payments for farmers affected by an animal disease outbreak. Recent literature has questioned the scope for the widely used “single mechanism” of compensation payments to incentivise farmers both to undertake costly on-farm biosecurity and to comply with disease reporting requirements. This paper develops a simple theoretical model of the farmer’s decision environment in this situation and uses a numerical analysis to illustrate both the potential for a range of levels of compensation payments to achieve this dual incentivising, and how this range is affected by changes in the parameter values of the farmer’s decision environment. Particular attention is given to the problem of spatial variation among farmers in the baseline of likelihood of a disease outbreak, and the findings of the paper are used to suggest a policy solution to this problem.