This paper has been published on the European Review of Agricultural Economics (april 2019)

This article analyzes the trade-off between yield and farmed area when a valuable species is affected by agricultural practices. It revisits, from an economic perspective, the “land-sparing versus land-sharing” debate. We show that the optimal yield is either increasing or decreasing with respect to the value of the species. Land-sparing and land-sharing are not necessarily antagonistic; for sufficiently elastic demand function, both the optimal yield and the farmed area decrease with the public value of the species. A general assessment of a second-best policy is performed, and several particular policies are considered.

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