Swot Analysis Of Gm Food

Consumer Response to Genetically Modified Food Products in Japan

Strengths
Through the years, consumers’ willingness to accept genetic modification in food productions showed significant increase from the year 1995 to 1998. The attitude shown by the consumers toward biotechnology have been changing since the Hoban study, as more information has been provided to the pubic primarily through the media.
From the 2000 survey, 97% of respondents reported familiarity with the term “biotechnology,” implying awareness of biotechnology has increased significantly among the Japanese public.
The estimation results show that variables representing food safety and attitudes towards environmental point of view, biotechnology self-reported knowledge, self-reported risk insights on GM foods, income, and increase the WTA (willingness to accept) compensation for choosing GM foods (i.e., education all considerably increased the required discount).
An improvement for future work in evaluating consumer preferences for GM foods in Japan should include offering respondents much larger discounts, possibly even offering to pay a segment of respondents to consume GM foods (i.e., a discount greater than 100%).

Weaknesses
Since these studies were conducted, recent events in Japan may have affected consumer sentiments. They now have a biased view of GM food in a way that doesn’t bring justice to the positive attributes that GM food could bring.
Many external factors such as the economy downturn, government scandals, and the hype on mad cow disease in Japan may have affect consumers’ confidence to the government reassurances on GM food.
Studies investigating the correlation between consumer characteristics and food safety concerns have discovered that socio...

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...o consume it but opposed to it in general.

Conclusion
Experience of the segment of the market that purchased and consumed GM products would subsequently convince a greater percentage of consumers of the safety of GMOs and of the equivalence of products containing GMOs with conventional products.
Safety and equivalence factor would become experience characteristics rather than credence characteristics. If this takes place, the threshold issue would become irrelevant in the long run. This argues for a fairly loose standard of what can be considered GMO-free that is not very costly to meet.
The differing view of producers on what the percentage of GM components in their products would to be labelled as GM products may have cause misleading perception of the consumers on the products they consume and their personal preferences regarding GM products in the long run.