FARMER PREFERENCES FOR DROUGHT TOLERANCE IN HYBRID VERSUS INBRED RICE
Hybrid Rice: Source- flickr (CGIAR Climate)
Droughts represent a significant constraint to rice production in much of India. Roughly 20 percent of India’s total land area is drought prone, leading to significant negative impacts on rice production, both in reductions in area cultivated and in lower yields. Droughts directly impact farm incomes and often have significant secondary impacts such as indebtedness, asset depletion and health consequences. There is therefore significant scope for rice with drought-tolerance traits (DT) demonstrating resilience under drought stress with no yield penalty under normal conditions.
The role of the private sector in the research and development of new seed technologies is considered important. Hybrid rice in particular, with characteristics of stress tolerance possesses great advantages in terms of yield benefits to the farmers and thus it is imperative to enquire whether there is a scope for the private and public sectors in the research and development of these varieties. A recent IFPRI Discussion Paper on Farmer Preferences for Drought Tolerance in Hybrid versus Inbred Rice addresses the previously unanswered questions of whether the private sector might play a role in developing similar strains through applications of advanced biotechnology, and whether their research and development efforts would benefit the poor in vulnerable and hazard-prone areas. The paper uses discrete choice experiments to examine farmer’s preferences for DT traits and explores heterogeneity in those preferences using primary data collected in rural Bihar, India.
Results from the study show that farmers greatly value the reduction in yield variability offered by the DT technology. At the same time, farmers were willing to pay even more for varieties that offered yield advantages even under normal conditions. Using information on farmer’s risk and loss aversion, the results show that these factors significantly affect farmer’s preferences for different kinds of rice varieties. The results also suggest that there are different demand structures for DT varieties and DT hybrids. This implies natural market segmentation and scope for cooperation between the public and private sector research resulting in potentially beneficial public-private partnerships in the development and delivery of DT technologies that could benefit large numbers of poor and vulnerable farmers in India’s drought-prone areas.
Other related work
The Economics of Hybrid Rice in South Asia
