Understanding Farmer Preferences to Guide Crop Improvement: The Case of Grasspea in Ethiopia
通过焦点小组讨论和选择实验，研究了埃塞俄比亚农民对草豌豆改良的偏好，发现农民不重视降低毒性，而更偏好抗虫等其他改良，建议将未来需要的改良与农民当前偏好的改良捆绑推广。
Building climate resilience in agriculture may usefully rely on crop improvement informed by social science studies of farmer preferences. Here, we present the case of grasspea in Ethiopia, a resilient and nutritious legume that can survive conditions where many other crops fail. Excessive consumption however carries the risk of an irreversible, crippling disease, this is possible in the future since the weather extremes that climate change is predicted to bring will create the conditions in which grasspea is one of the food sources that will likely see increased consumption. Crucially, farmers are not fully aware of this risk and may therefore not adopt the low-toxin grasspea that crop scientists have developed and that is about to enter the breeding pipeline. In this study we use focus group discussions, key informant interviews and choice experiments to investigate farmer preferences for grasspea improvement. We confirm that farmers do not place much value on reduced toxicity. Instead, they have strong preferences for other improvements, such as resistance to pests. This suggests that improvements that are needed in future but not yet preferred (i.e. reduced toxicity) should be bundled with improvements that farmers already prefer.