Abstract
The principal objective of the realized study is to evaluate the economic importance of the behavioral interactions which emerge from managed and wild bees, called bees’ complementarity in arable crop farms. A particular emphasis was placed on examining how the economic importance of bees’ complementarity should affect the public policy regulation in order to safeguard the provision of pollination services. The first Chapter of this Ph.D. thesis provides the theoretical framework on which this economic valuation is based. Chapter 2, provides an ecological-economic model displaying farmer’s decisions between two agricultural inputs, pollination services and pesticides, and two sources of pollination with different characteristics; managed bees, which can be replaced at a cost, and wild bees, which rely on a population being sustained within the farmland. Moreover, we take as a given that the services of wild and managed bees are in a complementary relationship. The third Chapter of this thesis, integrates the findings of Chapter 2 in a Mathematical-Programming territorial ecological-economic modeling in order to explore the potential impacts of policy changes on the provision of pollination services and on farmers’ incomes for different rates of farmers’ cooperation. Finally, Chapter 4, evaluates the effectiveness of French policy measures towards the provision of pollination services and it discusses how the results of our analyses may contribute towards the amelioration of the effectiveness of these measures. The major result of our research is twofold. Firstly, the knowledge of bees’ complementarity may offer to farmers an alternative optimum management strategy. Secondly, the inclusion of this knowledge in the implemented policy measures may facilitate farmers’ adoption process towards low-input practices and, consequently, increase their effectiveness towards the sustainability of pollination services for the agricultural and food systems.