Description: Department Seminar

Location: 368A Heady Hall

Contact: John Crespi

Title: Strategic Responses to Ban Enforcement Uncertainty: Antibiotic Application Decision in Plan Agriculture

Abstract: The rise of antibiotic resistance in plant agriculture, combined with limited disease management options and potential bans on antibiotics, complicates growers' disease management decision-making. We develop a dynamic model of optimal antibiotic use under uncertainty about the enforcement of bans in the case of apple fire blight. We find that proactive growers who adjust to anticipated bans tend to overexploit antibiotic efficacy and gain benefits compared to business-as-usual growers. However, if a government fails to enforce an announced ban, these proactive growers incur losses. The magnitude of these losses in nonlinear with respect to the value of the crop in question. We generate loss estimates for a range of apple crop values and show that regulatory uncertainty can have negative, neutral, or positive unintended impacts on growers.