Assessment of farmers’ willingness to pay for quality seed using dynamic auctions: The case of smallholder potato growers in Tanzania.

Irish potato is an important income and food security crop in many sub-Sahara Africa countries (SSA). However, the neglect of the potato Irish potato industry and failure of privatization to spur investment in seed potato production stifled the industry. Hence farmers have been forced to recycle seed, resulting in quality degradation and, in some cases resulting in up to 66-75% yield, and hence income, declines. The recent global food price swings has led to renewed interest in developing potato subsector in most producing SSA countries. One intervention by SSA governments has been in trying break the quality seed bottleneck by investing in generation of quality seed. Such investment involve construction of state of the art seed production labs to clean degraded seed and evaluate imported seed, on-station and on-farm testing, and promotion smallholder seed production. This study uses data collected from Tanzania to examine farmers’ willingness to pay such seed. Since 2009, Tanzania government has heavily invested in developing seed potato industry jointly with international and national research organization through donor support.

Citation: Okello, J.J.; Lagerkvist, C.J.; Kakuhenzire, R.; Parker, M.; Schulte-Geldermann, E. 2014. Assessment of farmers’ willingness to pay for quality seed using dynamic auctions: The case of smallholder potato growers in Tanzania. Annual Meeting of The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Minneapolis (USA). 27-29 Jul 2014.
2015-10-22
POTATOES
Eastern Africa
Tanzania

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