No abstract

The invasive Japanese beetle ( Popillia japonica Newman ) can infest more than 300 types of host plants and has been classified as the second most important potential priority pest in Europe. Given growing concerns about its impact on the food sector, we apply a scenario approach, which accounts for spatial and temporal aspects of the invasion process, to estimate future damage costs for major European crops in the absence of management and in consideration of future climate scenarios based on the representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 for the period 2040-2069. We find that potential damage costs can be substantial, ranging from €30 million to €7.8 billion per year. While we find heterogeneous effects across countries and crops, large grape producing countries like France and Italy have an immense damage potential of around €92 million and €68 million per year, respectively. This implies that a reduction of the spread speed of the beetle can generate positive externalities across the European food sector. Thus, European food policy should incentivize and reward early pest management. This includes measures to reduce spread associated with human activities, e.g. travels, such as increased pre- and post-border bio-security procedures, particularly during summer months when the beetle spread rate is highest. For countries where total control is no longer possible, we emphasize the importance of investments in monitoring and environmentally friendly control measures. Specifically, in industries with high preferences for organic products, research on biological controls is important as it supports key policy goals of reduced dependency on chemical pesticides, ecosystem restoration and market opportunities.

The Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) is classified as a high-priority pest in the European Union and is reported to have caused extensive damage to grapevine leaves in Italy. As there are few studies, which measure the beetle’s socio-economic impact, we conduct a first descriptive assessment of grapevine farmers’ perception of the beetle’s impact and assess the pest’s effect on private management costs using a partial budgeting approach. Our sample includes data from 65 producers and 118 vineyard plots. In terms of farmers’ perception, we find that farmers anticipate increased management costs and believe a further spread of the beetle will lead to at least moderate yield and quality damages for the majority of plots (58-91%). While farmers do not expect to stop grapevine cultivation for the majority of vineyard plots, affected farmers they believe it is likely to very likely for 29% of plots. We also find that affected farmers rate their vines’ resilience higher than unaffected farmers do. Using a partial budgeting approach, we find that a Japanese beetle infestation leads on average to a net income decrease of around €2727 per hectare. This decrease is due to an average increase in labor costs of around €1715. Additionally, an average yield reduction that results in a revenue loss of around €966 and additional control costs of around €47 per infested hectare, further contribute to the net income decrease. Even though the small number of observations does not allow us to make conclusions about the beetle’s impact on the Italian viticulture sector as a whole, our findings provide first insights and demonstrate the need for environmentally friendly and effective control products that can replace labor-intensive manual control measures, which are currently applied in Japanese beetle infested vineyards.