Biodiversity Conservation under an Imperfect Seed System: the Role of Community Seed Banking Scheme

Abstract

The study is an empirical investigation of agrobiodiversity conservation decisions of small farmers in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The primary objective is to measure the effectiveness of Community Seed Banking (CSB) in enhancing diversity while providing productivity incentives. The analytical framework draws from the synergetic nature of the possible improvment of the working of the seed system and enhanced diversity. We employ Amemiya’s GLS estimator to investigate simultaneity between participation and the level of diversity. Our results indicate a significant impact of participation in CSB on farm-level agrobiodiversity. However, farmer knowledge and experience associated with biodiversity conservation were not found to have the expected reinforcing impact on the degree of biodiversity. CSB participation also led to a moderate productivity increase consistent with the need for such incentives to enhance diversity at a farm level. Our assessment of the performance of the GLS estimator yielded a significant discrepancy between the GLS and bootstrap estimates. This led to the conclusion that bootstrapping asymptotic estimations might be required for appropriate inference even when sample sizes are reasonably large.