Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
(0.275), food quality 0.209), environmental concerns (0.144) and community development
concerns (0.091). Consumers considered food safety and wellness to be more important
attributes or features of a food production system than other attributes such as food quality
and the capacity of the food system to contribute to community development or environmental
quality. In each row of Table 3, the preference scores for each type of production systems are
presented. The third column of Table 3 shows that organic agriculture is preferred, when
considered alone, based on its perceived capacity to generate benefits associated with wellness
(0.575), food quality (0.533), safety (0.530), environmental concerns (0.515) and community
development (0.514). The average preference rating of 0.544 shown in the last row of Table 3
indicates that consumers prefer the organic production system over the sustainable alternative
and conventional agriculture, which were assigned preference ratings of 0.274 and 0.182
respectively.
Criteria
Conventional
Sustainable
Organic
Preference
Environmental Concerns
0.203
0.282
0.515
0.144
Food Safety
0.186
0.284
0.530
0.281
Food Quality
0.195
0.272
0.533
0.209
Wellness
0.162
0.262
0.575
0.275
Community Development Concerns
0.209
0.278
0.514
0.091
Final Decision
0.182
0.274
0.544
1
Consumer preference scores are ranged between 0 and 1.The sum of each row, excluding the preference in the last
column, is equal to 1.00.
Table 3.
Consumers' attitudes toward food production systems by the criteria
Since consumers' preferences for the production systems of food may be influenced by their
demographic traits and behaviors [37], demographic traits may be used, where heterogeneity
in consumers preferences exists, to segment consumers into groups based on their demo‐
graphic characteristics. Cluster analysis was employed using the variables: age, education and
employment status to identify discrete groups of consumers based on their preferences. The
results indicate that there are three distinct groups of consumers: young professionals, older-
technician and oldest-unemployed. The preference ratings each segment assigns to the three
production systems are shown in Table 4. These results show that there were no statistically
significant differences among the consumer segments in their preferences for the food
production systems. Table 5 indicates priorities each segment assigned to criteria used to assess
the food production systems; young professionals accorded a higher priority to community
development concerns than the other two groups.
