An Economic Evaluation of the Environmental Benefits from Pesticides Reduction Program in Khuzestan Province

The intensive use of pesticides has posed detrimental effects on the environment. Concerns over those environmental impacts have led to many efforts in pesticides usage reduction. As an example, economic instruments that can be used in explaining suitable policies. With Estimating the economic value associated with pesticide reduction and identifying the effective factors on administration and success of pesticide reduction policies can be assisted in designing pesticide regulations. The purpose of this study is to identify the economic benefits associated with pesticides reduction in Khuzestan province, Iran. The required data were collected from 180 farmers of Khuzestan province in 2009. The study uses Contingent Valuation survey to estimate farmers willingness to reduce three risk level (high, moderate and low) for five environmental categories (human health, birds, aquatic species, beneficial insects and livestock). A Tobit model with heckman two-stage procedure estimates is developed to determine the factors that affect farmers willingness to pay. With calculating the willingness to pay it was found that greater concern is evident for human health, birds and livestock, and relatively less for aquatic species and useful insects. The economic benefits for 15 environmental classes varied from 571623 Rials (human/high) to 56926 Rials (beneficial insects/low) per person per cropping season. The estimate of the Heckman two stage procedure results in determining the decisive factors in willingness to pesticides reduction strategies which consist of income, number of IPM strategies, farmer importance to decrease pesticides risk, farmer perception about environmental impacts, confronting with environmental impacts and own tenure, all with positive effect, while age and pest severity with negative effects. Farther results indicate that the variables of growing vegetables and percentage of IPM strategies have the most positive effect, while cropping corn and daily wage of hand weeding worker have the most negative effect on amount of willingness to pay.