View article

A lot of efforts have been made globally to improve the iodine content of staple foods through, but acceptance and willingness to pay (WTP) studies are limited. While WTP has been applied to other biofortified crops, such studies have evaluated WTP for a single unit of food products, when in reality, consumers often buy more than one unit. This research estimated the initial demand for iodine biofortified cabbage and cowpea in Uganda using open-ended-choice-experiment (OECE) that allows to estimate consumer demand for multiple units of products. In addition, it introduces bilateral bargaining to the consumer WTP literature to estimate the possible transaction boundaries between the producers and the consumers. Results show that consumers are willing to pay high premium for the two crops. They are willing to pay higher premium for the cowpea than for the cabbages, as cowpea is consumed more than cabbages in the study area. To this stage, bargaining is seen to produce comparable results to OECE. The study provides key information for producers and authorities on how to value iodine biofortified cabbages and cowpea, once produced. It also emphases the need to integrate bargaining to other established methods of estimating consumers’ WTP, especially in those regions where bargaining is common in food markets