Environmental Awareness and Probability of Adoption of Ecofriendly Agricultural Practices by Vegetable Farmers: A Case Study from Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka
Edirisinghe, J.C., De Silva N., Udayanga, L., Gimhani, D.R., Kuruppu, I.V. and Thanthsara, N.
ABSTRACT
Agricultural production with excessive amounts of fertilizers and agrochemicals has become a serious concern all over the world. Statistics show that applications of fertilizers have grown over the years and remarkably in Asia. Therefore, this research attempted to study the relationship between the knowledge of farmers on the environmental issues or ‘environmental awareness’ on environmentally responsible behavior or ‘environmental stewardship’, by considering a sample of farmers from Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka, where soil and ground water is rapidly degrading due to overuse of fertilizer. Environmental awareness was measured in terms of an index developed using the answers to a set of Likert type statements and was related to stewardship behavior measured in terms of willingness to adopt ecofriendly agricultural practices in a Bayesian framework. A Bayesian probit model was estimated with non-informative priors for model parameters with a post burn-in sample of 80,000 iterations. Results revealed that environmental awareness is strongly linked with the intention to adopt ecofriendly agricultural practices. Human capital available to farmer moderates the impacts positively, while the farm size moderates it negatively.
KEYWORDS: Bayesian, Environmental awareness, Environmental stewardship, Probit, Kalpitiya