Consumer Benefits and Acceptance of Genetically Modified Food

• Widespread consumer resistance towards genetically modified (GM), particularly as expressed in the news media, has led to slow adoption of this technology outside of North America. • Much of the resistance appears to stem from public perceptions that GM crops benefit large multinational corporations, food producers, and typically have no apparent consumer benefits. • In order to test whether clearly defined consumer benefits would change consumer preferences, a purchasing experiment has been conducted in New Zealand where the GM issue has been highly politicized, with cherries labelled as spray free-GM, organic or conventional. These were offered for sale in a roadside stall, with price levels manipulated to test price sensitivity of the different options. • Approximately 27 percent of consumers proved willing to purchase GM labelled cherries at the prevailing market price and this percentage increased as the price dropped. Introduction Genetic modification refers to alteration of the genetic makeup of an organism so that the modification is transmitted to the organism's offspring. Strictly speaking, it includes processes such as selective breeding that have been practiced for thousands of years (Tester,2001). Traditional methods of GM include: 3 • Selection for desirable characteristics within existing populations – most modern crops and domestic livestock have been so altered by this process that they bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors. • Crossing closely-related species – e.g. modern wheat has arisen from two sequential crossings of three separate species. • Selecting mutants – e.g. herbicide-resistant canola (oilseed rape) developed from plants that appeared spontaneously in Canadian canola fields. However, the controversy about GM usually concerns the modern techniques which have come to be known as genetic engineering (GE). These techniques involve: • Deletion, change or moving of genes within an organism • Transfer of genes from one species to another • Modification of existing genes or construction of new genes and their incorporation into any organism (Eichelbaum, et al.,2001) Traditional techniques for genetic modification were limited to those occurring between closely-related organisms, whereas GE enables transference between any two organisms, no matter how distantly related in evolutionary terms. For the rest of this paper, the terms GM and GE will be taken to be synonymous, and to exclude the less-contentious traditional forms of genetic modification involving hybridisation and