Farmers’ preference and willingness to pay for Ecosystem Services from Small-scale Agricultural Management Intervention Options in Burkina Faso: A Discrete Choice Experiment Approach

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate farmers’ preferences and their willingness to pay (WTP) for ecosystem services derived from four agricultural water management (AWM) and resource recovery and reuse (RRR) intervention options in Burkina Faso, using choice experiment (CE). These include; small water infrastructures, drip irrigation, organic matter recovery from waste, and treated wastewater. The design decisions relating to attribute selection, the level of attributes, alternatives and choice tasks were guided by literature, field visit, focus group discussions, experts input and an iterative process of STATA to generate an orthogonal main effects CE design. The data used was generated from a random sample of 300 farm households in the Dano and Ouagadougou municipalities in Burkina Faso. Results from conditional logit, latent class logit and mixt logit models show that farmers have positive and significant preferences for drip irrigation, treated waste water and organic matter. However, they are WTP on average, more for drip irrigation and organic matter for agricultural sustainability. In line with economic theory, the cost of an intervention reduces demand for a given intervention. These findings can provide policy makers with evidence for agricultural policy design to build farmers’ resilience in the Sahel