Willing but not willing to pay more for clean vines of bio-fortified sweet potato varieties. evidence from orange fleshed sweet potato smallholder farmers in Malawi

Root and tuber crops (RTCs) such as sweet potato play a significant role in enhancing adaptation of smallholder farmers to food, nutrition, and economic insecurity in the face of climate change and other food system threatening crises. However, with RTC seed systems where social norms and networks guide farmers’ exchange of planting materials, markets are rarely used as sources of planting materials and transactions are mostly non-monetary. The use of non-market sources and non-monetary transactions when sourcing RTC planting materials has a direct bearing on the efforts to commercialise and sustain the production of early generation seed given that estimation effective demand for the planting materials remains a challenge. As such, this study used an open-ended format of the contingent valuation method to elicit farmers’ willingness to pay for clean vines of bio fortified and non-biofortified varieties of sweet potato. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to sample 721 smallholder farmers in central and northern regions of Malawi. Seemingly unrelated regression model was used to analyse the determinants of farmers’ farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for clean planting materials for the two sweet potato varieties while ANOVA was used to compare the WTPs. Further, a triple hurdle model was used to compare and analyse farmers’ decisions around the stated WTPs. The study found that the average WTP for clean vines of non-biofortified varieties was found to be higher than that of bio-fortified variety. The differences between the WTPs showed that proportions of farmers whose WTP for clean vines of biofortified varieties was lower, same, or higher than WTP for non-biofortified were 38 percent, 28 percent, and 32 percent respectively. Results for both the Triple hurdle and SUR models show that demographic, socio-economic, and institutional factors are crucial determiners of WTP for clean vines and the associated decisions to pay less, same, or more. The study concludes that farmers are willing to pay higher for non-biofortified varieties than for biofortified varieties and that various factors are into play. There is need for continued efforts and campaigns that aim at sensitising farmers on the importance of bio-fortified varieties. Aside enhancing farmers’ accessibility to clean vines, seed system interventions must therefore pay attention to farmers’ varietal preferences in order to enhance acceptability of the improved varieties if adoption is to be increase.