| The genetically modified foods have been controversial since they had been introduced in our country. The proponents argue that GM can increase production,reduce pollution and benefit the nation and the people; but the opponents think it is one of the biggest food safety problems and it will ruin the state and destroy the race accidently. However, due to the increasing of population in our country, the demand for agricultural products is also increasing. The soybean oil is the leading edible oil in China. But our production cannot satisfy the demand and GM oil has the advantage of more oil and lower price which makes our country import large amount of soybean and the proportion is as high as 80%. So that 90% of the soybean oil in our market is crushed by imported GM soybean. More than 65% Chinese staple is rice. Due to the end of growth of China’s rice production in recent years, the imports increase and the price is lower than domestic rice which makes lots of rice farmers to grow corn. GM scientists believe that the GM rice can solve the food security problem and their research has made great progress in recent years. However, GM rice still not be allowed large-scale commercial cultivation because of the safety risk.The theory of demand deciding supply illustrates that products must first be recognized by consumers if they want to occupy the market. And consumers make the choice to maximize their utility, namely, consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is influenced by both external factors including consumers’ demographic characteristic and internal factors including consumer psychological characteristic. Rational consumer will search for related information by various means(TV, Internet, etc.) before they purchase products. Information and knowledge will form consumers’ cognition and cognition forms attitude. Information, cognition and attitude will affect consumer WTC.In the end, the consumer will consider the incomes and other economic factors. As wecan see, information plays a basic role in the process of purchase decision. Therefore,information is particular important to analyze consumers’ WTC GM foods.Accordingly, the paper takes the GM soybean oil and GM rice for example to study consumer cognition and attitudes and WTP of the GM foods and analyze the factors affecting Shanghai consumers’ WTC the two kinds of GM foods applying seemingly unrelated regression(SUR) model. It also verifies whether the factors which cannot be observed influencing consumers’ WTC the different kinds of GM food are consistent and analyzes whether the impact of the information and other factors can being observed on WTC is different.From the analysis we can get:(1) the consumers’ cognition toward GM food,especially the insect-resistant transgenic rice, is in the low levels.(2) Most consumers think that it is necessary to implement compulsory identification system for GM food,but their intention to the label is not high. Consumers’ evaluation on the safety of GM soybean oil is not ideal.(3) Consumer willingness to pay(WTP) for insect-resistant GM rice is very low and some people refuse to buy GM rice.(4) Consumer WTC GM soybean and GM rice is influenced the same factors that cannot observed but the effect of the observable factors have obvious differences. The positive information has positive impact on consumers’ WTC the GM soybean oil and the negative information predominates when there is both the positive and negative information at the same time.The consumers’ connatural cognition and safety evaluation of GM soybean oil has a remarkable positive effect on the WTC. The influence of the negative events and consumers’ attitude to compulsory labeling system is negative. Besides, gender, kids,professional status, income, reading of label information, evaluation of government regulation and purchasing frequency and so on affect significantly the WTC. |
PDF Full Text Request