Farmers’ Willingness to Pay for New Storage Technologies for Maize in Northern and Central Benin

Abstract

The aim of this study is to identify the attributes of storage structures sought by maize producers based on a choice experiment. The experimental processes took place in the maize production areas of northern and central Benin. The sample consisted of 365 maize farmers (80.55% male and 19.45% female) randomly selected from 40 villages. Data were collected and analyzed using a latent class logit model to study the heterogeneous preferences of the key attributes of storage structures. The results show that men and women are eager to change their current practices and to adopt new storage technologies. The study identifies four potential producer segments, including three large-farmer segments that have access to credit and are particularly attracted to structures related to metal silos. Of those three segments, two are also attracted to improved traditional silos. Another segment of poor farmers, who do not have access to credit, prefer to have a very efficient structure (loss rate of less than 5%) that is designed with local materials. This study suggests that knowledge of the heterogeneity of preferences, as well as the preferred attributes, is important for the development and dissemination of better technologies by agribusiness firms, institutions and policymakers.

How different hermetic bag brands and maize varieties affect grain damage and loss during smallholder farmer storage

“…The efficacy of hermetic storage options has received significant research attention recently in Africa, with a particular focus on hermetic bags and metal silos (Murdock et al, 2012;Baoua et al, 2013;de Groote et al, 2013;Guenha et al, 2014;Singano et al, 2019;Baributsa et al, 2020), as well as the socio-economic aspects (Atibioke et al 2012;Bokusheva et al 2012;Villane et al 2012;Gbénou-Sissinto et al 2018). However, most studies to-date have evaluated up to two different brands of the bags on just one variety of the focal crop or a mixture of varieties, whereas our study compared five brands of hermetic bags, with each brand being compared for three different maize varieties, under two contrasting agro-ecologies and for two consecutive 8 month long storage seasons.…”

Farmers' willingness to pay for smart farming technologies: evidence from a smart drip irrigation technology in North China

“…DCE is frequently used to examine consumers' preferences for commodities (Hensher et al, 2005.). And it has been increasingly applied in examining the farmers' preference for agricultural technologies CAER 16,1 (Gb enou-Sissinto et al, 2018;Kahwai et al, 2021). In DCEs, respondents are asked to choose a product by comparing the same set of product properties rather than directly comparing the product and its price value (Lusk Jayson, 2004).…”

Drivers of Small-Scale Fishers’ Willingness to Adopt Property Rights Co-Management in the Lake Nokoué and Porto-Novo Lagoon Complex in Southeast Benin

“…This will lead to a latent class specification. The latent class logit (LCL) model does not violate the IIA hypothesis and differs from the MXL model as it admits that coefficient distribution can be discrete rather than continuous [76]. The benefit of an LCL over an MXL is that in the former, we, as researchers, do not have to make any distributional assumptions, but we do have to decide how many support points to include in our discrete distributions [77,78].…”