Willingness to Pay for Participation in Community-Based Programme: A Case of Seed Self-Help Group in Uttar Pradesh

Collective action is seen as an institutional tool for increasing the access of small and marginal farmers to technologies, inputs and service provisions in agriculture. Though the benefit of such community driven programmes is well documented in the literature, sustainability remains an unsolved puzzle; most of the community-based programmes are established and run by programmes supported by donors. In this line, the present study has attempted to estimate the willingness to pay of the farmers to participate in the community driven seed production programme run by an NGO, which in turn could indicate the sustainability of the programme in the long run. In the present form, the programme provides the required quantity of the foundation seed which is given to the farmer and he has to pay-back „X‟ times the quantity of seed received, as a payment. The study, using double bounded contingent valuation, estimated that farmers are willing to payback 11 times the quantity of seed that they receive, as against the existing norm of 3 times. The study clearly indicates that the farmers are ready to pay higher amounts to participate in the seed production programme.