Speaker
Description
The provision of marketable ecosystem services in agroecosystems is volatile, resulting in farmers' facing income risks. Those risks are likely to increase in the face of biodiversity loss and climate change. Various formal insurance mechanisms have been applied to mitigate this risk while other types of insurance have recently been discussed, such as social insurances.
Social insurances occur if societal actors share farmers' income risk. Two examples of social insurances already exist at a larger scale: payments for ecosystem services and community-supported agriculture (CSA).CSA is an increasingly popular system to locally connect food producers and consumers. Members pay a fixed amount of money to the CSA in exchange for the future, uncertain delivery of food. The mechanism results in insurance to the CSA farmers by potentially increasing stabilizing their incomes.
In this paper, we utilize the CSA concept to study whether consumers are willing to share farmers' risk to stabilize their incomes using a basket based choice experiment.
In the experiment, respondents have to choose a weekly basket of dairy products which they could imagine to purchase from a CSA. Based on this basket, they are then confronted with two CSA contracts that differ in quantity and composition risk as well as in another attribute indicating whether the farmland of the CSA is high nature value or not. Further, the contracts differ in the price per unit of milk equivalents. The respondents are then asked to choose between the two contracts and an opt-out.
Our contribution lies in the combination of the basket-based choice experiment approach and the elicitation of different types of risk preferences. The study is currently developed, the pre-test was already conducted and data collection for the main study is planned for the end of March 2025.
| Status of your work | First results |
|---|---|
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
