Assessement of economic benefits linked to organic and low input farmland in 4 BIOBIO case study areas

Abstract

This report (BioBio Deliverable 3.4) gives a detailed overview of the non-monetary valuation of biodiversity carried out in four countries (France, Hungar y, Italy and Uganda) and provides a comparative analysis of the results. We se lected the focus group methodology to carry out this task because this method is useful to unde rstand the way of thinking of a group of people, and because earlier resear ch projects also applied this method successfully. We involved only farmers in the research (and did not involve general citizens) partly because the existing literature provides already some findings on the perceptions of the gene ral public and partly because of time and resource constraints. Two fo cus groups were organized in each country to get to know how organic and conventional farmers perceive biodiversity, what kind of values they attribute to biodiversity, and how they de fine the range of beneficiaries who enjoy the positive effects of biodiversity. Focus group data ga thered in this research are more suitable for the comparison of organic and conventio nal focus groups than for a cross-country comparison due to the limited size and other specificities of the sample...