1 Willingness to Pay for Environmental Services Among Slash-And Burn Farmers in the Peruvian Amazon
WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES AMONG SLASH-AND BURN FARMERS IN THE PERUVIAN AMAZON: IMPLICATIONS FOR DEFORESTATION AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL MARKETS Joyotee Smith1, Susana Mourato2, Erik Veneklaas3, Ricardo Labarta3, Keneth Reategui3, Glendy Sanchez3 1 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia 2 Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University College London and University of East Anglia, UK 3 Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), Cali, Colombia INTRODUCTION Traditional approaches to halting tropical deforestation by small-scale farmers have primarily focused on increasing the private benefits of sustainable alternatives, such as agroforestry (Current, et al., 1985), or on increasing the costs of deforestation by correcting domestic policy distortions (Vosti, et al., 1997). This study seeks to enhance the effectiveness of these approaches by investigating whether the global environmental values of forests can be captured by farmers in developing countries. Specifically we investigate the possibility of small-scale farmers in the Peruvian Amazon supplying carbon sequestration services. International trade in carbon sequestration services is permitted under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Change Convention (1997). If gains to trade exist, farmers in developing countries could be compensated for increasing forested areas on their farms, by carbon emitters in developed countries. We use the Contingent Valuation Method (Freeman, 1994; Mitchell and Carson, 1989) to elicit the compensation required by farmers to switch to a land use system which would lower carbon emissions. These values are then compared to the cost of emission reduction by switching to cleaner fuels. Our estimates of the cost of supplying carbon sequestration services through forestry activities is one of the rare estimates relating to small-scale farmers (Ridley, 1997).
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