Abstract
The growth in global aquaculture production may address the lack of sustainability in wild fisheries, alleviate poverty in rural and coastal areas, and help meet the worldwide increase in demand for animal protein. However, there is an ongoing debate about the severity of the environmental impact of aquaculture production. Investing in new high-tech production systems can address both productivity growth and the environmental externalities, but high investment costs hinder adoption of high-tech production methods. We investigate the potential of a payment for environmental services program easing access to capital for producers to increase willingness-to-invest in more sustainable aquaculture practices in Vietnam. We conducted two discrete choice experiments to explore the supply and demand side of the policy. First, we elicited the public’s willingness-to-pay to reduce the environmental impact of conventional shrimp aquaculture, and second, we elicited farmers willingness-to-accept a credit subsidy to invest in high-tech production methods. Our results show that the public care about reduced environmental impacts, while farmers strongly prefer increased productivity. Furthermore, the public’s willingness-to-pay for reduced environmental impacts exceeds producer’s willingness-to-accept a subsidy to invest under most scenarios. This implies a potential for more sustainable aquaculture production in Vietnam.
Highlights
The growth in global aquaculture production has significantly contributed to addressing the lack of sustainability in wild fisheries, helped meet the worldwide increase in demand for animal protein (FAO 2019), and has become a source of income for rural and coastal communities, especially in developing countries (Klinger and Naylor 2012)
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Sect. 2, we provide a brief review of shrimp aquaculture industry in Vietnam; in Sect. 3, we present the data and econometric approach; in Sect. 4, we present the results; and in Sect. 5 we provide some general discussion of our results and a few policy implications and avenues for future research
It becomes a classical tragedy of the commons situation (Hardin 1968), where no individual farmer has the incentive to reduce the use of pesticides and antibiotics if the neighbors do not reduce theirs as well
Summary
The growth in global aquaculture production has significantly contributed to addressing the lack of sustainability in wild fisheries, helped meet the worldwide increase in demand for animal protein (FAO 2019), and has become a source of income for rural and coastal communities, especially in developing countries (Klinger and Naylor 2012). A promising (and achievable) path to sustainability is the adoption of high-tech aquaculture production methods These production methods use less land, less water by recirculating, and have fewer nutrients and chemicals in the run-off as a result of wastewater treatment (Klinger and Naylor 2012). Except for Barr and Mourato (2009), these studies focus on assessing the potential for PES schemes mostly through either looking at willingness-to-pay (WTP) for an environmental improvement or a willingness-to-accept (WTA) compensation for not implementing a policy. The total cost of the program varies depending on the size of the subsidy and how many acres of land used for shrimp aquaculture is converted to high-tech production practices. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Sect. 2, we provide a brief review of shrimp aquaculture industry in Vietnam; in Sect. 3, we present the data and econometric approach; in Sect. 4, we present the results; and in Sect. 5 we provide some general discussion of our results and a few policy implications and avenues for future research
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