Author:

Keywords:

valuation, frankincense

Abstract:

Dry land forest ecosystems provide a number of services and are home to a number of economically important tree species. Boswellia papyrifera is one of such tree species that is found in dryland forest ecosystems and that provides important provisioning and cultural services. Frankincense from Boswellia papyrifera forest (BPF) is a traded non-timber forest product used in pharmaceutical, food, cosmetic and chemical industries. It is widely used for rituals in different religions and as a fragrance during coffee ceremonies in Ethiopia. Moreover, the collection of frankincense is a source of income to rural people and the country gets foreign currency from exporting the product. Its leaves are good for livestock fodder. The tree is capable of growing in degraded soils and recommended for combating desertification in the arid areas of the tropics. However, in north-eastern Africa the resource is under continuous degradation due to a number of human induced factors. The public good nature of the resource has contributed to the continuous degradation of the resource and has led to this ‘the tragedy of the commons’ and requires conservation measures. We used data from a contingent valuation study with discrete choice responses to assess the factors influencing rural households’ willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to contribute labor (WTCL) for BPF conservation in Ethiopia. We relied on different regression techniques to estimate households’ WTP and WTCL. Besides the level of bid amounts, we found that household income, education and gender as the most important factors affecting WTP whereas household income and number of household labor as the most important factors affecting WTCL. Households are willing to pay at least US$ 4.86 per year or contribute 7.32 labor days for the conservation of BFP and we found no statistically significant difference in both WTP and WTCL between users and non-users of BPF. The WTCL converted at the market wage rate for daily labor of the study area is equivalent to US$ 20.52 per year and is more than four times the WTP. Therefore, this study indicated that, people are willing to contribute for conservation of the resource despite the fact that Ethiopia is a low-income country. Moreover, the study also indicated that free labor contributions can be used to estimate the valuation of non-market benefits of environmental amenities of income constrained rural households in developing countries.