Abstract

SARMIENTO, Miguel; BRUNO, Carlos  and  GARCIA, Jorge. Willingness to pay to conserve provisioning ecosystem services in native forests in Santiago del Estero, Argentina. Investig. Agrar. [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.1, pp.14-22. ISSN 2305-0683.  https://doi.org/10.18004/investig.agrar.2022.junio.2401705.

In Santiago del Estero, Argentina, there are approximately 7 million ha of native forests, many of which have individuals of the genus Prosopis. In addition to timber use, carob trees provide ecosystem services (ES) of provision of fruits for the production of flour for food purposes. The objective of this work was to estimate the economic value expressed in pesos per month of the willingness to pay (WTP) for the provision of carob fruit services. It was investigated in three departments of the province of Santiago del Estero. The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) was applied to obtain the Consumer Surplus (CS) from the WTP through a survey of the owners belonging to three associations of producers dedicated to this activity. One hundred eleven surveys were carried out during 2018 with questions referring to the uses and value of ES. The data were analyzed to obtain the function that represents the WTP and then the CS. The function that best describes the data distribution is a polynomial with an R2 of 0.96 from which the area under the curve was obtained. The results show that the individual EC is $3,093/month/person (US$92/month/person at US$1=$30). The sample consisted of producers and collectors of carob pods. The CS of the sample resulted in $343,369 per year (US $11,445.63). In the area, there are 1,097 people dedicated to this activity who together generate a Total Annual Consumer Surplus of ECTA $3,393,470 per month (US $113,115.66 per month) which represents the environmental economic value of the ecosystem services of provision of fruits for food purposes.

Keywords : forest production; non-timber forest products; economic value; uses; and conservation.

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