Analyzing consumers' preferences for using fresh vegetables with environmental labels

IntroductionFarmers are under increasing pressure to use fewer pesticides for production and pest control. Farmers and other producers are responding to consumer concerns about pesticides by creating new marketing opportunities for products grown with environmentally friendly practices. The purpose of this study is to estimate consumers' willingness to pay for each of the information provided in the "Protective Agriculture Label" and determine the factors affecting consumers' willingness to pay. The two conservation agriculture labels designed in this study are the "How to Cultivate" label and the "Environmental Damage" label. The cultivation method label provides information about the raw materials used to produce the product, while the environmental damage label provides information about the environmental harm caused during the production process. The purpose of this study is to estimate consumers' willingness to pay for each type of information provided on the conservation agriculture labels and to determine the factors affecting consumers' willingness to pay.Materials and Methods In this study, in order to analyze consumers' preferences for protective agricultural products in Mashhad, the choice experiment method was used, and conditional logit models and logit with random parameters were used to estimate its parameters. Choice experiment is a common tool for valuing environmental functions and services. The required information was obtained by completing 170 questionnaires from the consumers of Mashhad city. The analysis of collected data is done using many models, most of which have a logit form. In this study, conditional logit and logit models with random parameters have been used to investigate the effect of the characteristics of agricultural product labels on consumers' willingness to pay and to estimate the amount of willingness to pay for each of the characteristics. Results and DiscussionIn this article, consumer preferences for protective agricultural products have been analyzed using the choice test method. For data analysis, conditional logit and logit with random parameters model were used. The results obtained from this study have shown that the characteristic accuracy of the measurement method was the highest and the label-issuing organization had the lowest willingness to pay. The variables of gender, the presence of a child in the family, and the presence of people with a specific disease in the family had a positive and significant effect, and the variable of age had a negative and significant effect on the willingness of consumers to pay. In both labels, the sign of the price variable is negative, which is in accordance with the theory of economic utility. The comparison of the calculated final effect for two labels of environment and method of cultivation has shown that, in general, the probability of choosing the label of method of cultivation is higher than the probability of choosing the label of environmental-biological damages.  In 53% of the cases, the selected option was the label of how to cultivate, and in 15% of the cases, none of the labels were selected. The amount of willingness of consumers to pay to obtain information about the way of cultivation and damage to the environment is very low. Even consumers willing to pay to obtain detailed information on production (such as the degree of water pollution with which the product was irrigated, the level of soil pollution in which the product was grown, and the type of poisons used) and environmental damage (such as contamination of groundwater with The reason for product production is not air pollution due to product production and global warming (increasing temperature due to product production). In this regard, more research is suggested in the field of reasons for the low willingness to pay of consumers.ConclusionExamining the willingness to pay of consumers has shown that people are willing to pay more for the accuracy of the measurement method than for the label-issuing organization. The amount of consumers' willingness to pay for the characteristics of the organization issuing the label and the accuracy of the measurement method were obtained as 5 and 17.04 Tomans, respectively, so it can be concluded that Accuracy is more important than an organization for consumers.