y public conservation efforts.
One of the attractive features of in-situ conservation is its ability to
maintain evolutionary processes and farmers' indigenous knowledge
that cannot be protected in gene banks. However, even if in-situ
conservation is believed to be an effective means of conserving crop
genetic resources, the degree of success is highly dependent on
individual farmers' decisions, which, as noted above are mainly
governed by traditional varieties addressing farmers' private concerns.
Thus, it is important to understand the farm-level incentives
and constraints for in-situ conservation. This study contributes to the
literature by providing insights into farmers' preferences for crop
variety attributes, using a choice experiment approach in a typical
developing country setting — Ethiopia. Choice experiments are hardly
applied in crop diversity studies. There are several reasons for using a
survey-based approach instead of relying on actual behavior. The
most important is the absence of well-functioning markets for crop
varieties (seeds) and their attributes due to high transaction costs,
limited information and other forms of market failure in developing
countries including Ethiopia. For this reason, the market fails to value
the desirable traits of farmers' varieties that are stored and exchanged
more informally through local networks and value systems. Due to the
lack of market data, Jabbar (1998), for example, used a hedonic
pricing method to attach values to the different attributes of animal
genetic resources in southern Nigeri