The agricultural production in Ecuador in order to meet the consumers’ demand and due to the absence of promotion of other systems to produce, farmers has to boost up the use of fertilizers and pesticides. As a consequence of this, causing chemica...
The agricultural production in Ecuador in order to meet the consumers’ demand and due to the absence of promotion of other systems to produce, farmers has to boost up the use of fertilizers and pesticides. As a consequence of this, causing chemical residues on food which affects to one of the rights of food sovereignty that intends to provide quality, safe and nutritious food produced under sustainable systems. Nevertheless, organic farming is one alternative besides of provide food to contribute to soil conservation, biodiversity and climate change. This paper analyzes the factors that are affecting on Ecuadorian consumers’ preferences and as well their willingness to pay a different premium prices for organic food. It was used secondary data, surveyed by government officials in 23 of 24 provinces of Ecuador in 2017, having as a result of 3022 respondents. The data is being assessed by frequencies, factor analysis, cluster analysis, and multinomial logistic regression. As a results of this research the educated consumers consider organic products are healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly, certified and controlled under standards of regulation which increases their preferences to purchase it. Nevertheless, the household size and income are factors with less influence on consumers’ preferences. Furthermore, consumers are willing to pay from 1% to 10% on organic food because they trust on certification standards, are free of chemical residues, none contains transgenic, produced by small farmers and packaged on recyclable material. However there are consumers that shown less probability on willing to pay into this range, whom are in the age of 26 to 30 years old with income between $376 to $1000 dollars and consumers that belief the organic production does not use allowable agricultural inputs. Finally the willingness to pay in the range of 11% to 20% is by convinced consumers who were educated and strength their trustiness that organic food is certified and follow a strict management and periodic monitoring by accredited certifications bodies. In contrast for consumers in the age of 26 to 30 years old with 0 to 375 USD shown a less influence of willingness to pay into this range. To conclude the organic agriculture in Ecuador should be paid more attention through agricultural policies to promote, enhance and invest on it and educate the consumers to increase the consumption of this model of production.