Farmers Preference and Willingness to Pay for Sugarcane Seed Attributes in Kenya

Over the years, Sustainable production of sugarcane has been impeded by scarcity of high-quality seeds, this has been mainly attributed by dominancy use of recycled planting materials which are often sourced from local social networks. To help reverse this trend, a number of organizations have been involved in the development of improved and clean seed cane planting material. However, a sustainable seed-system has not yet been actualized largely due to limited development of improved cane seed systems. In order to inform the improved cane seed development efforts, it is important to understand farmer’s preference toward different attributes attached to sugarcane seed varieties. It’s due to the above insistence to identify these preferences that this article has been developed, the data used was collected in Kakamega and Kisumu Counties which occupies the large sugarcane production zone. 284 sugarcane farmers and Value chain actors were interviewed. Choice experiment approach was used in assessment of farmers preferences for sugarcane seeds attributes . The findings of the study revealed that mean age of the farmers was approximately 50 years (49.96 yrs.) with average of 14 years in sugarcane production and average land size of 2 acres with most of farmers having just basic education (Primary school level). The findings indicated that, in general, sugarcane farmers mostly preferred to purchase seed cane planting material with high adaptability to the environment, high yielding, disease resistance, early maturity and Sucrose level in that respective order of importance. The marginal willingness to pay for each attribute show that adaptability had the highest WTP of 3970 followed yields (KES.1316), resistance (KES.608), maturity (KES. 379), and level of Sucrose content (KES.238)respectively. The study therefore recommends that awareness creation on improved cane seeds should be done, and an efficient distribution system for improved seed cane should be established.