Standards of ecological compensation for traditional eco-agriculture: Taking rice-fish system in Hani terrace as an example

Traditional eco-agriculture provides many ecosystem services which are important for the local environment, especially in mountain areas. In order to encourage the farmers to engage in eco-agriculture, it is necessary to establish an eco-compensation mechanism for them. As the compensation standard is one of key issues in establishing eco-compensation mechanism, this paper calculated the standard based on the farmers’ willingness to accept (WTA) and the input-output analysis of eco-compensation. We took the traditional rice-fish eco-agriculture as the research object, conducting field surveys in Hani Terrace of Honghe County. Through the questionnaires in 2011, we obtained the farmers’ willingness to accept government compensation and market compensation. Then, the research evaluated the output of eco-compensation, the economic value of rice-fish paddy ecosystem services. Finally, under different market compensation standards, we compared the input and output of government compensation. The results show that, in 2011 the government should to pay farmers 7462 yuan·ha −1 ·a −1 to meet their willingness, but the output (ecological benefit) was only 7393 yuan·ha −1 ·a −1 . However, when the rice price increases 1 yuan·kg −1 because of the limited use of chemicals in the next year, the government just has to pay farmers 4062 yuan·ha −1 ·a −1 and the surplus will be 3331 yuan·ha −1 ·a −1 .