Disparity between willingness to pay/accept for corn straw counter-field technology: A case study of farmer survey in Xushui District of Baoding City

How to reveal the real willingness of stakeholders for eco-compensation of technological practices has not only been a difficult research issue in measuring technological externalities, but also a key question in improving the accuracy and effectiveness of agricultural compensation policy. A number of studies have used ecological services value of farmland ecosystems to estimate the value of technological externality. The accuracy of the assessment results have been questioned on the basis of lacking adequate consideration of equilibrium of the relationship between participant parties. In view of this, this study first clarified the relationship between the main parties, where farmers were practitioners of production technology and environmental protection and therefore the beneficiaries of technological advancement. Therefore, the measure of technological externalities fully respected the wishes and interests of farmers. The second objective of the study was to determine research methods used in assessing the willingness of farmers. The paper used Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), which is a general intention value assessment used to determine the willingness to pay (WTP) and the willingness to accept (WTA), to determine the adoption of straw-return technology across 502 respondents. Then it estimated the maximum WTP and minimum WTA values of the mechanical costs (including:straw pulverization and rotational tillage) based on multivariate log-linear model estimation method. Based on the findings of the study, the expectancy values of WTP and WTA were respectively 38.23 ￥ and 137.52 ￥ per household per year for shredding and spinning costs of straw-return to the field, with WTA/WTP ratio of 3.6. The paper further analyzed the differences between WTP and WTA based on multiple logarithmic regression models and noted that the influencing factors of WTP and WTA asymmetry were labor force, information source, irrigation cost, mechanical cost and harvest mode. In addition, mechanical cost had a significant positive effect on the differences between WTA and WTP, while all other factors had a negative correlation. It was noted that on the one hand of the process of promoting whole-process mechanization of maize production, the increase in mechanical cost partially neutralized the beneficial effects of subsidies on farmers in the country. As a result, farmers had a low enthusiasm to return straw to the soil. On the other hand, since most corn farmers used to adopt traditional mode of production (including low labor and irrigation inputs, use of artificial harvesting and lack of information sources), the WTP of farmers for straw counter-field was also low. In fact, farmer households were even looking forward more to the government to speedily implement a reasonable subsidy policy. Thus, subsides were to be used by policy-makers to induce further adoption and reduce premiums costs on production practices. Empirical studies have confirmed that compensation standard of straw mulching technology in the northern arid area of China was 87.88 ￥ per household per year, which was reasonable and effective. In summary, the government should pay more attention on three issues in decision-making:1) establishment of a fair and effective compensation policy mechanism for farmers to work together and share the fruits of technological advancement; 2) strengthening of research on the methodology of technical-value assessment and establishment of a technical-value assessment based system for CVM and econometric models; 3) improvement of monitoring mechanism of promotion of agricultural technology and setting up information resource sharing platforms.