Abstract
Organic farming has been widely recognized as the best alternative that provides healthy food, environmental protection and ecological balance which have been seriously threatened by high input agricultural methods. This demands the need of promoting safe food production which has been considerably neglected especially in the developing countries. The aim of this article was to investigate the factors affecting to farmers’ willingness to produce safe agricultural products or to adopt organic farming methods. On the basis of field survey data obtained from rice and vegetable farmers in Uva province in Sri Lanka and utilizing a binary logistic model this study found that farmers’ willingness is positively influenced by a number of factors: farmer’s education level, household income, income from agricultural activities, years of farming, land extent, relative price of organic products, knowledge on eco system services, risk behaviour, and entrepreneurial skills. Finding suggest that farmers could be motivated to produce safe food products by incorporating these influential variables in targeted programs rather than giving ad hoc economic incentives. Key words : Safe agricultural products; Farmers’ willingness; Organic farming; Sri Lanka DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-2-19
Highlights
Organic farming has been defined as a natural and sustainable farm management practice, which depends upon managing the agro-ecosystem instead of relying on chemicals, such as pesticides, artificial fertilizers, additives, and genetically modified organisms (Britanica, 2018)
Favorable effects of organic farming methods minimize the incidence of cancer and the transfer of resistance genes from animal production systems to human pathogens (Hansen et al, 2002; Gupta, 2017)
Researchers have stressed that Sri Lanka as a country with full of natural resources has a large potential to fulfil a significant portion of ever-growing market demand for organic products in the World
Summary
Organic farming has been defined as a natural and sustainable farm management practice, which depends upon managing the agro-ecosystem instead of relying on chemicals, such as pesticides, artificial fertilizers, additives, and genetically modified organisms (Britanica, 2018). Since the theoretical foundation as well as the concepts have not been well defined, producers are not sure of whether they have used appropriate methods to guarantee food quality, and consumers are uncertain whether they receive quality products (McCluskey, 2000; Ranaweera, 2016) When addressing this informational asymmetry, it is essential in understanding the farmers’ motivations and their willingness of adopting self-sustaining agricultural production system (May and Paratori, 2012) which may “lead to developing a stable and balanced ecosystem, encouraging all natural cycles, protecting soil, water, animals, plants and human health, which would in turn result in creating a stable and economically viable production system in the long term (Ranaweera, 2016). The main objective of this paper is to investigate the economic and noneconomic determinants of farmers’ motivations and their willingness to produce safe agricultural products
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