Motivations towards farming in Lebanon: a comparison between organic and conventional farmers.

The research work focuses on Lebanese farmers’ behaviour, attitudes and beliefs with regards to farming activity and specifically investigates the motivations that lie behind their choices. The study was carried out in cooperation with the American University of Beirut (AUB), in particular with the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, which recently launched the Healthy Basket (HB) project, a Community-Supported Agricultural initiative aimed at supporting Lebanese organic farmers. The work also aims to explore AUB-assisted conventional farmers’ barriers or risks for not converting to organic farming. The insights from this exploratory research highlighted differences between conventional and organic farmers’ views on farming activity. The study applied the Means-End Chain theory paired with the laddering methodology, adopting the hard laddering approach. During a four-week fieldwork in Lebanon, collective, in-depth interviews were carried out with two groups of farmers (one of 16 HB organic farmers and one of 17 AUB-assisted conventional producers) by administering a self-completed questionnaire. The "Mecanalyst Software" was used for the analysis of the data collected through the laddering interviews. After entering and encoding the data, the software constructs an implication matrix that indicates how often concepts have been mentioned and linked to each other, both directly and indirectly. The Mecanalyst Software furthermore enables an aggregation of the Means-End Chains (MEC) into a Hierarchical Value Map (HVM). These maps are the graphical representations of farmers’ motivational structures. Results show that organic farmers have two paths of reasoning while conventional farmers have just one path. Love for family is the most important value for both groups; it is reported in the three general maps. Patriotism, expressed by Lebanese organic farmers, is absent in previous studies carried out in different countries andto have a satisfactor income is central in the cognitive structure of Lebanese conventional farmers. No market opportunities, no institutional interest and lack of knowledge are the most frequently reported barriers for not converting to organic farming. Policies should be focused on marketing and extension