Understanding Farmer Preferences to Guide Crop Improvement: The Case of Grasspea in Ethiopia

Matt Heaton, Borja Perez-Viana, Peter Emmrich, Belay Mulat and Arjan Verschoor

Journal of Development Studies, 2025, vol. 61, issue 8, 1221-1241

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2025.2453519 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:61:y:2025:i:8:p:1221-1241

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FJDS20

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2025.2453519

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Studies is currently edited by Howard White, Oliver Morrissey and Ken Shadlen

More articles in Journal of Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().