ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the marketability of agricultural biodiversity, henceforth called 'agrobiodiversity', by examining the relations between markets, agrobiodiversity products and consumer demand, choices and drivers of consumer behaviour. Agrobiodiversity is a key public good that delivers crucial services for human well-being. It is considered to contribute substantially to poverty reduction, food security, health improvement, income generation and resilience. To understand the marketing potential of an agrobiodiversity product and its suitability for niche markets, information is needed on both the product and the value chain through which it will be marketed. Agrobiodiversity is prone to the market failure because of its characteristics as an impure public good with inter-generational and interregional dimensions, that is, agrobiodiversity has both public and private economic attributes, and farmers as a group tend to generate less diversity than is desirable in contemporary and future society.
