A Nanjing Case Study Of Chinese Consumers' Attitudes Towards GM Foods

The rapid development of genetically modified technology has greatly influenced such industries as agriculture, medicine, chemistry and so on during the late 19th century. Along with this the international controversy on the safety of GM foods is becoming intenser. On one hand, supporters kept extolling the advantages of GM technology, such as enhancing the yield, reducing the cost, improving the quality etc. On the other hand, opponents went on worrying about problems caused by GM technology as food safety, ethics and environment. The controversy on GM foods induced a set of debate in other fields. It's known to all of us that consumers' attitudes are the decisive factors , for their decisions are the key to the success of the commercialization of GM foods.The main purposes of this paper are to investigate consumers' willingness to buy GM foods and the stability of their attitudes. Since the implementation of the labeling policy hasn't been carried out during our research period, we had to stimulate the future circumstance in the market to find out consumers' potential attitudes. We have conducted the telephone survey for two continuous summer holidays and the investigators are the students of Nanjing Agricultural University. Among all those factors influencing consumers' attitudes and the stability of their attitudes, our research focused on the effect of media reports. In order to identify the different influence of positive and negative information, the whole sample was divided into two groups. One group was provided with positive information, while the other group was offered negative information. At this moment, most consumers are not familiar with GM foods , which caused the instability of their attitudes, therefore, our findings are not as same as each other.We drew some conclusions from our two years' research. They are as following: (1) Consumers in Nanjing knew little about GM foods; (2) Consumers' characteristics have influence on their attitudes, but have no influence on the stability of their attitudes; (3) Consumers' awareness of GM foods influenced both their attitudes and the stability of their attitudes; (4) Media reports on GM foods influenced both consumers' attitudes and thestability of their attitudes.However, this is only our preliminary research. To learn more about consumers' attitudes we '11 have to expand our research scope and extend our survey time.