Consumer Willingness To Pay For Food Safety In Jiangsu Province China

Because a lot of unsafe foods have appeared on Chinese food market, food safety concerns have escalated among Chinese consumers recent years. Some consumers even said they have no idea to make certain which kind of food is safe to eat. In order to assure the safety level of food products, Chinese government is establishing some new regulations to strengthen food market management. However food safety is an income-elastic good, if Chinese consumers are unwilling to pay or can not afford higher price for food safety, the producers will have no motivation to produce safer foods. Based on this situation, the safe food market will not exist in the long term. Therefore consumer willingness to pay for food safety is the key factor to successfully establish food safety market. And on the other hand, understanding consumer willingness to pay will be beneficial to achieve the optimum amount of safety.The main purpose of this paper is to apply Contingent Valuation Method, which is general research method to measure consumer willingness to pay for food safety, to study the situation in China. According to the usage of Contingent Valuation Method and Chinese reality, we chose B. Chinensis as our study object and the level of pesticide residues as safety indicator. Because of the limitation of time and energy, we investigated Nanjing city consumers and Yangzhou city consumers, both of which are cities in Jiangsu province. More than six hundred in-person interviews were conducted in July 2005 in the two cities. Through technical question format and econometrics method, we got consumer willingness to pay for food safety in reduced pesticide residues B. Chinensis.From the collected data, a logit model was employed. The results indicate that the mean willingness to pay for reduced pesticide residues in B. Chinensis is ￥2.68 per half a kilogram which is equivalent to an increase of 335% over the market price of regular B.