Variety choice and attribute trade-offs within the framework of agricultural household models: The case of bananas in Uganda

The purpose of this research is to study the determinants of farm-level variety choice and variety demand for banana cultivars in Uganda within an integrated agricultural household modeling framework. Of particular interest is the role of banana consumption and production attributes, among other factors, in influencing the scope of the household planting decision. A revealed preference for a particular banana variety encompasses a set of underlying household, market and agro-climatic characteristics that influence farm-level decisions. It is also associated with farmers' perceptions of the intrinsic consumption and production attributes (or specific genetic traits) embodied in the chosen variety and attribute trade-offs that this entails. The model of variety choice developed here provides the analytical means for conceptualizing the interdependence of household production and consumption decisions at the level of attributes inherent to specific varieties grown.; The econometric approach used for estimating the set of individual variety demand equations is the Heckman two-step procedure for count data models—the Poisson and the Negative Binomial—that take into account potential sample selection problems. The results indicate that the factors that significantly influence the growing decision (variety choice) and the extent of growing (variety demand) are cultivar-specific, with differences between endemic and non-endemic cultivars, and within the endemic group of cultivars. Production attributes are found to be jointly important to the extent of the planting decision, while the consumption attribute taste is significant for only the non-endemic cultivars. The existence of separability between consumption and production decisions is ambiguous when using the conventional approach, while it appears to hold in the case of endemic cultivars when the attribute approach is employed. Participation in banana markets is found to not only be household-specific, but also cultivar-specific. Levels of rainfall and good management appear to be important to the scope of the banana planting decision for most cultivars. Effects of uncertainty at the level of production attributes (bunch size, resistance) are also cultivar specific.