The Economic Challenges of Dealing with Citrus Greening: The Case of Florida

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Abstract

While pest management decisions are made at the farm level, a distinctive characteristic of the pest management of invasive species is its public-good nature. Here, we examine the challenges that a vector-disease pathosystem such as Diaphorina citri Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Liviidae)—citrus greening, creates for the adoption of prevention and collective management practices from an economic perspective. Those economic challenges originate from the choices and behavior of individual growers, which can impact not only their own payoff but also the choices, behavior and payoffs of other growers; influencing, for example, the spread of the disease, the vector population dynamics, and the adoption of proposed scientific solutions. While for most people the economics of invasive species is limited to calculating damage or control costs, economics is more than that. Economics can provide insights on the interactions between human behavior and natural processes, enabling a better understanding of the rationale of individual growers’ choices, which are key for the design and implementation of effective public policies to deal with invasive pests and diseases.

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A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems.

Elinor Ostrom (2009)

A major problem worldwide is the potential loss of fisheries, forests, and water resources. Understanding of the processes that lead to improvements in or deterioration of natural resources is limited, because scientific disciplines use different concepts and languages to describe and explain complex social-ecological systems (SESs). Without a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate. Until recently, accepted theory has assumed that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources and that governments must impose solutions. Research in multiple disciplines, however, has found that some government policies accelerate resource destruction, whereas some resource users have invested their time and energy to achieve sustainability. A general framework is used to identify 10 subsystem variables that affect the likelihood of self-organization in efforts to achieve a sustainable SES.