GREENBELTS IN THE CORN-BELT - RIPARIAN WETLANDS, INTRINSIC VALUES, AND MARKET FAILURE

Historical agricultural practices have severely undermined the recreational quality and ecological integrity of Midwestern streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Reestablishing riparian forest corridors would create wetland buffers partially protecting water quality and aquatic ecosystems from agricultural runoff. On the basis of an explicitly spatial market-failure model of land use in the riparian (floodplain) zone, contingent valuation survey methods are used to estimate the recreational and intrinsic benefits of improved "river quality' in selected Iowa and Illinois river basins. It is found that willingness to pay for river quality is related to income and recreational participation. Intrinsic values are found to be expressible as economic values similar to that of other public goods. Together with recreational values, they are larger on a per-acre basis, in many instances, than the production of agricultural commodities. -from Authors