Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
GM plants, we can distinguish at least i ve
dif erent publics.
h e i rst is the general public in their role
as potential buyers and consumers of
products that contain ingredients based on
GM plants. h e second is the same general
public, but in a very dif erent role: as voters,
or opinion poll participants, who may
endorse or reject particular agricultural and
food policies on GM plants. h e third public
is the farmers; that is, the potential
customers of seed companies who market
GM cultivars. h e fourth public is the
customers of these farmers: food companies
who might decide to use GM ingredients in
their products, plus their customers, the
retail chains that may or may not decide to
buy the resulting products and sell them on
to consumers. Finally, there is a host of
pressure groups, lobby organizations and
political bodies who seek to inl uence agri-
cultural and food policies directly (through
their lobbying activities) and indirectly (via
the media and their assumed inl uence on
the opinions held by the general public) to
further the interests of their respective
patrons. It is important not to confuse these
i ve publics; arguably, much of the confusion
in the debate about GM plants was caused
by an astonishing lack of ability among
political decision makers to distinguish
them and weight their inl uence in an
appropriate manner.
majority of consumers would prefer such a
labelling policy, including consumers in
countries where such labelling has long been
mandatory (such as the member states of the
EU) and also in countries where such labelling
is not mandatory (for example, the USA).
Empirical evidence collected in the i eld
- that is, observations of the behaviour of
consumers in actual retail settings, as
opposed to the laboratory - suggests that
labelling has negligible ef ects on the choices
made by consumers. Econometric studies
that compared the retail sales in dif erent
food categories before and after the intro-
duction of mandatory labelling regimes (for
example, Marks
et
al
., 2004, in the
Netherlands; Lin
et al
., 2008, in China)
found no or only weak ef ects. Experimental
selling studies in which products clearly
labelled as GM were sold to consumers, for
example at farmers' markets or roadside
stalls, found no substantial ef ects either
(Mather
et al
., 2005, in New Zealand; Knight
et al
., 2007, in Belgium, France, Germany,
Sweden and the UK; Aerni
et al
., 2011, in
Switzerland).
h e main result of these i eld studies was
that consumers applied their usual decision
criteria in the same manner to products
containing GM ingredients as they did to
conventional products from the same
category. In other words, the attractiveness
of a product to a consumer does not seem to
depend much on the processes by which
some of its ingredients have been produced
- after all, consumers buy products, not
technologies. Instead, the attractiveness of a
product depends on its quality, its price and
the appropriateness of its package size. h e
'it depends on the product' character of
these i ndings is rel ected by the extremely
heterogeneous results of laboratory
experiments in which small groups of
participants are asked to make hypothetical
choices between GM products and their
conventional counterparts. In a meta-
analysis of 51 primary studies, Dannenberg
(2009) found ef ect sizes that varied from an
average willingness to pay a 240% price
premium for a GM product in one study to
a 784% premium for a conventional
counterpart in another study (the median
Consumers
In many ways, the buying behaviour of
consumers can be regarded as the most
straightforward indicator of public accept-
ance. In order to make a decision to buy or
not to buy a product containing GM
ingredients, consumers have to be able to
ascertain whether or not such ingredients
are contained in the product. h is requires a
labelling policy: a clear indication in the
ingredients list, usually on the back of the
package and in rather small print, which
ingredients have been derived from GM
plant material. Consumer surveys through-
out the world speak a clear language: a large
