Beyond the ecosystem benefits of diversification through wheat–pea intercropping, this review analyzes the barriers and levers to its adoption and diffusion. The present review shows that structuring the value chain around the products of this innovative cropping system faces a set of technical (i.e., varietal selection, phytosanitary issue control, crop management sequence, collection management, and storage), economic (i.e., cost, price, market opportunities, and contracting), and public policy (i.e., subsidies for ecosystem services provided by intercropping) obstacles that contribute to its slow adoption and dissemination in Europe. However, the value chain resulting from the wheat–pea intercropping system has levers to be exploited at all levels, particularly in terms of its competitive advantages, ecosystem benefits, and superior product quality. The results of this review help to identify priorities that actors of the value chain can address to better focus their efforts on significant problems and solutions that can accelerate the adoption and dissemination of this agroecological system.

This paper focuses on the barriers and levers to the adoption of Wheat–Pea intercropping systems. More precisely, we define a hierarchy of the main barriers and levers to adoption using the Relative Importance Index (RII) method. This method allows comparison of incentives, negative (brakes) and positive (levers), for adoption at two levels of the value chain, i.e., the farmer and the co-operative level. For this comparison, we conducted two surveys: one on 71 Belgian farmers and the other on 19 French co-operatives. Our results show that the barriers of high importance for the farmers are both internal and external, while the co-operatives consider only internal barriers. That is, the farmers mainly focus on external (market access and public subsidies) and internal (lack of technical advice and extension, as well as collection and storage problems) obstacles to evaluate the intercropping system. For the co-operatives, the most important barriers are related to the sorting and storage of the mixture (internal barriers). Regarding levers, farmers and co-operatives converge on the importance of almost the same external levers, e.g., building new value chains through contracts and labeling, specific extension services for farmers and logistical support for co-operatives.

Mixed cropping and livestock production is a widespread farming system in less developed countries. The literature has mainly highlighted the synergistic effects between crop and livestock systems from an agronomic and environmental point of view, but has never investigated the (economic) complementarity that may exist between the two activities. Complementarity exists when mixed farming allows smallholders to earn higher incomes than in specialized systems, i.e., crop-only or livestock-only. Our paper is the first to test for complementarity in mixed farming by deriving empirical predictions from the theory of supermodularity, which are tested econometrically using a database of 360 farming households in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Our estimation results confirm the existence of a significant and positive complementary effect between crop and livestock activities, and also provide a direct measure of this effect. The smallholder can earn an average additional income of 791 rupees (out of an average total income of 12,010 rupees) by choosing mixed farming. This implies that smallholders adopt mixed farming not only for its agronomic and environmental benefits, but also because it can generate higher incomes than specialized farming systems to alleviate smallholder poverty. Apart from the choice of activity, our estimation results show that the other variables that significantly increase smallholder incomes are the education level of the household head, as well as access to urban markets, herd size, and land size. We also find that the positive impact of land expansion does not depend on the property rights regime, i.e., the additional land can be owned or rented (sharecropping). A specific public policy aimed at reducing smallholder poverty must prioritize the improvement of these key factors, especially access to urban markets and sharecropping.

In context of global challenges facing agriculture, our article addresses the extent to which the synergistic nature of agroecological innovations may reconcile environmental and technical efficiency of farms. We develop an empirical model, namely conditional efficiency framework, which explicitly accounts for context-dependent drivers like synergy and complementarity of innovations. Using a sample of 567 banana farms in the French West Indies, our estimates confirm the complementarity effect since the joint adoption of agroecological innovations increases the technical efficiency scores much more than other drivers and each of the innovations taken in isolation. We also show that advice and extension services as well as human capital variables are key adoption levers for public policy since they reduce the variability of production and thus the risk associated with the joint adoption of the agroecological innovations.

The objective of our paper is to provide an explanation for the lack of joint adoption by farmers of cleaner technologies in banana production, specifically fallow period (FP) and disease-free seedlings (DFS). Our hypothesis is that while these technologies are synergistic from an agronomic and environmental perspective, and thus efficient from a social interest perspective, they are substitutable rather than complementary from a farmer’s private interest perspective. In other words, farmers receive lower returns from adopting both technologies together than from adopting them in isolation. To test this hypothesis, we present a unified empirical framework for assessing complementarity. We estimate a structural model of complementarity that overcomes the unobservable heterogeneity bias found in previous models using a database of 607 banana farmers in the French West Indies. Our results support our hypothesis, showing a substitution effect between FP and DFS rather than a complementarity effect. Moreover, we observe a contrasting profile of adopting farmers: smallholders who are reluctant to change adopt FP, while more specialized farmers who anticipate a pesticide ban adopt DFS. A public policy that promotes joint adoption should compensate smallholders for the cost of the DFS technology, while compensating more productive farmers for leaving their land fallow.