Can Payments Improve Environmental Services on Farmland?

The ILEA paper compares the ecosystem services in the Gafsa oasis in Tunisia, provided by mono-cropping families with those of multi-cropping families. it contains an hypothesises about what impacts various PES mechanisms – direct payments and subsidies; ecolabels; and tax mechanisms and tradable permits -  might have and draws lessons from that.
Lessons learnt are

• The multi-cropping system binds carbon more than mono cropping system
• The family with long term lease contract replicated traditional farming methods with good ecosystem services, the family with a short term contract was in no position to invest in different crop layers and even destroyed them to get at least a short term benefit from the land they had in use;
• in general, more than de jure land rights, de facto control is decisive for a PES scheme