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The United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity raised expectations of high benefits in genetic resource trade with megadiverse countries. As a reaction the Andean Community (CAN) passed strict community access legislation. Against this background the main objective of this paper is to investigate whether public eco-regional cartels of megadiverse countries on the genetic resource market can increase the appropriable benefits from biodiversity. We analyse how cartel design affects cartel benefits and discuss the benefit distribution among cartel members. As a case study we examine the CAN community access legislation (Decision 391) in the light of biodiversity collusion. Our main finding is that cartels-contrary to their negative connotation-are potentially able to stimulate genetic resource trade, increase the providers' appropriable benefits from biodiversity, and reduce the costs for customers. This depends largely on the cartel design and the ability to attract bioprospecting agents. A member's benefit share rises in the member's relative biodiversity richness and even more in the quality of the institutional environment. The CAN collusion nullifies its market power by a deterringly overly strict access regulation and a lack of internal cooperation.

There is a broad discussion about the inclusion of agriculture into greenhouse gas reduction efforts, such as the Kyoto mechanism. As most agricultural GHG emissions stem from non-point sources, they cannot be directly measured and therefore have to be derived by calculation schemes (indicators). We designed five such GHG indicators for dairy farms and analysed trade-offs between these indicators´ feasibility, measurement accuracy and abatement costs based on emission reduction simulations with a highly detailed single farm optimization model. Results indicate that the trade-offs depend both on farm characteristics and on the targeted reduction level. In particular, advantages of detailed indicators decrease for higher abatement levels.

After a brief description of the ecological problems faced in the Lake Naivasha basin in Kenya, this paper describes shortcomings of existing environmental policy instruments employed by the Kenyan government. We argue that under certain conditions a bargaining process among commercial resource users at the lake and farmers at the upper catchments could enhance the robustness of this specific social ecological system (SES) by making use of Payments for Environmental Services (PES). The necessary conditions are: lake users’ perception of damages from permanent environmental problems like siltation and eutrophication that can be addressed by actions in the upper catchment, a minimal back up from the government that allows user groups to enforce their own rules, and a sufficient level of trust inside and between the different user groups. At the same time, the analysis identifies substantial obstacles for using PES to reduce water abstractions in the upper catchment and points out that the nature of the ecological problems and the societal situation at the lake interdependently determine the success probabilities of PES.

The location of first generation processing plants for biogas using bulky inputs is a prominent example of locational decisions of plants that face high per unit transport costs of feedstock and simultaneously depend to a large extent on feedstock availability. Modelling the resulting regional feedstock markets then requires a spatially explicit representation of demand. With production capacities of plants small in comparison to market size, large numbers of possible type-location combinations need to be considered, requiring considerable computation time under existing integer programming-based approaches. Therefore, in this paper we aim to present an alternative, faster and more flexible iterative solution approach to simulate location decisions for processing plants. And with greater flexibility, this approach is able to take into account spatially heterogeneous transport costs depending on total demand. The approach is implemented in a modelling framework for biogas production from green maize in Germany, which currently accounts for ca. five percent of Germany's agricultural area. By modifying green maize prices, demand functions are derived and intersected with regional supply functions from an agricultural model to simulate market clearing prices and quantities. The application illustrates that our approach efficiently simulates markets characterised by small-scale demand units and high, spatially heterogeneous transport costs.

A rational negotiation strategy for coming multilateral negotiations regarding climate change requires knowledge about possible social, economic and environmental effects of policy instruments for the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions. With this purpose, an agricultural sector model is expanded to cover greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural sources in Europe and policy instruments for their reduction. This modelling approach concentrates on the application of a permit trade scheme for emission abatement within the Kyoto Protocol ‘first commitment’ baseline. The effects derived of three alternative schemes are described in detail: the EU ‘burden sharing’ agreement option defined as regional emission standards, emission trading between regions inside each Member State, and finally, emission trading between all European regions. The analysis shows the importance of selecting an adequate combination of instruments of emission abatement for the design of efficient emission reduction policies.

In this paper, a brief overview on different economic aspects of greenhouse gas emission abatement in European agriculture is given. Three different typologies of emission mitigation approaches are defined and analysed from a modelling perspective: structural, management and technological measures. Their practical implementation in the CAPRI model is then presented and some selected model results used to analyse the following questions: what is the effect of emission abatement regulation on European agriculture? Are there any indirect environmental benefits to be expected from current CAP reform?