Preferences of the Poor Farming Household for Credit-Based Payment for Environmental Services: Attributes for Environmental Resource Conservation in the Oyo State Farm Settlements

Abstract

Previous studies affirmed that both poverty and environmental resources degradation need to be tackled concomitantly. The reason is that poverty and environmental resources (agricultural land) are intertwining as a nexus; hence a one traffic-proffered solution is not sufficient enough to reduce the afterward menace poverty and environmental resource caused. An incentive that serves as an ‘adjudicator’, a credit-based payment for an environmental service is recognized for this task. Though this is a hypothetical case of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) that understudied the would-be response of the poor farming household through their preferences of PES attributes of environmental resource conservation and poverty reduction. This was designed with the use of choice experiment method, which is a multi-attribute approach of valuing non-market goods (agricultural land). Evidently, this study has convincingly proved that the poor farmers are willing to conserve their agricultural land, if the provision of necessary incentive is presented to them. The examined three farm settlements in Oyo state are: Afijio, Ijaye and Ido farm settlements. Educationally poor farming household shows that, 93(65.49%) preferred both options, whereas consumption poor farming house  have 162(68.5%) respondents that sought for both option 1and 2.Housing/standard of living farming household recorded 98(34.63 %) for option 1 PES attributes and 95(33.57%)responded were for option 2 of PES attributes. The T-t test revealed that four of the paired poverty categories with respect to their preferences for the PES attributes options were significant. This study therefore suggests that poor farming household, whose farming is their livelihood should be sensitized to the provision of a deliberately designed poverty-environmental resource conservation credit-based PES, with a more flexible conditions. This will enable the poor farmers to be encouraged to participate in conservation of natural resource and by extension reducing poverty.