The Tradeoff Analysis Model Version 3.1: A Policy Decision Support System for Agriculture

Preface This document reports on a decision support system that has been developed by a research project carried out by Montana State University (MSU), Wageningen University (WU), and the International Potato Center (CIP), in cooperation with several national research institutes and universities in Peru and Ecuador. Three donors supported the project. The International Service to National Agricultural Research (ISNAR)-administered Ecoregional Fund to Support Methodological Initiatives financed a project called " Regional scaling of field-level economic-biophysical models. " The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) finances a project entitled " Tradeoffs in Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Andes: A Decision Support System for Policy Makers " through its Soil Management Collaborative Research Program (SM-CRSP). The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) through its Canadian-CGIAR Collaborative Research Grants in Agro-Ecosystem Management for Human Health program finances a project entitled " Human Health and Changes in Potato Production Technology in the Highland Ecuadorian Agro-Ecosystem. " Through mutual agreement of the donors, the three projects are managed as a single entity. The decision support system reported here is a second application of the tradeoff analysis method. The initial development was in a study of the environmental and human health aspects of pesticide use in potato production in Ecuador funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and documented in Crissman et al. (1998 a). The principal objective of the combined project is to develop a decision support system for assessing tradeoffs between agricultural production and the environmental and human health impacts of agriculture, for different economic, agricultural, environmental and health policies, and agricultural research. The conceptual model put forth in this document is a significant advance in the development of an integrated approach to agro-ecosystem assessment. In a call for international ecosystem assessment, Ayensu et al. (1999) notes that integrated ecosystem management requires three basic types of information. First they note that reliable site-specific baseline information on ecosystems must be widely available. Second, they state that the knowledge of how the production of goods and services in specific ecosystems will respond to biophysical changes must be made available to decision makers in the public and private sectors. Finally, they note that " integrated regional models that incorporate biophysical, economic, and technical change must be developed to provide policy makers with a better understanding of the consequences of different management options ". The authors recognize that these models must be able to communicate across scales so …