Analysis of adoption of genetic modification in pork production chains

During the past decades the agro-food sector has changed and developed due to the impact of new emerging technologies. Genetic modification (GM) presents one of the recently widely-discussed new technologies. The main objective of this study was to gain insight into adoption of genetic modification in the pork production chain. The project covered three important stages of the chain: the farrowing and fattening stages and the consumers.First,an integrating framework with important aspects for analysing the adoption of new technologies was proposed. Following this framework, consumers and chain participants and their concerns and benefits were analysed in an integrated way. First, consumer preferences for GM pork in general and in specific consumer segments were analysed. An attribute-based stated choice modelling approach (choice experiment) was used to investigate how consumers value certain GM applications in pork production chains, and whether and how consumers trade them off against the potential benefits. On average, the results indicate that conventional pork is preferred over GM pork. Among the four GM applications investigated, GM feed is preferred most. Furthermore, findings reveal that the attractiveness of different benefits offered does not influence consumer choices towards choosing GM pork over regular pork. It is only when consumers have already decided to choose GM pork that their further decisions regarding which GM pork to choose depend on the benefits offered. Next, five distinct consumer segments were obtained: "Anti-GM" (37.2%), "GM proponents" (29.3%), "Occasional eaters" (12.3%), "Application sensitive" (12.3%) and "Benefit seekers" (9.1%). Greater insight into consumer acceptance of GM pork in each segment was provided by profiling consumers regarding attitudes and socio-economic characteristics. Furthermore, the economic impact of GM applications for farmers was investigated in a farm-level model. The results showed that although GM applications improved output results in both stages, the GM applications considered have a limited economic impact. Overall, pork producers can expect reductions in their cost prices of 0.3% to 3.7% in the farrowing stage and of 0.2% to 2.4% in the fattening stage by using GM applications. The results obtained suggest that the current possible range of improvements in economic results due to the GM applications was rather limited and most likely would not be able to motivate farmers to introduce GM into their production system.