Converting to organic farming in France: Is there a selection problem?

Using a sample of French crop farms during the 1999-2006 period, we test whether lesstechnically efficient farmers are more likely to engage in organic farming in order to benefitfrom conversion subsidies. Despite some limitations in our data, we find no evidence of suchselection effect. On the contrary, our estimation results indicate that more technically efficientfarmers are more likely to convert to organic farming. This finding is found to be robust to themethod of calculation of efficiency scores, either parametric or non-parametric. This studyalso confirms that farm’s characteristics (education, farm size and legal status) and farmers’practices under conventional farming do impact the probability of conversion to OF.