GM attitudes: price plays a major role

The European Union has imposed a moratorium on the development of new GM crops since 1998, reacting to consumers' concerns about the safety of transgenic foods, but supporters of biotechnology argue that there is little, if any, evidence to support these fears.

Indeed, Europe's current moves towards abandoning the moratorium have been prompted by the threat of legal action from countries such as the US and Argentina on the grounds that it constitutes an illegal barrier to trade.

But even if the EU does give the go ahead for GM crops to be planted and for increasing numbers of GM food products begin to appear on the supermarket shelves, albeit with tough new labelling requirements, European consumer concern - not to say fear - about GM still remains high, and convincing them that such products are safe to eat will be an extremely difficult task.

Or perhaps not. A recent study of UK consumer attitudes to GM food products suggests that while opposition still remains high, it diminishes rapidly when other factors, in particular price, come into play.

Writing in the online journal AgBioForum​, researchers Wanki Moon and Siva Balasubramanian from the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale suggest that European food manufacturers have tended to avoid GM ingredients because of this overwhelming consumer antipathy, but postulate that once the moratorium is finally lifted, the economic reasons for using increasing amounts of GM crops in their products will become too clear to ignore.

Put simply, the likelihood is that GM ingredients will cost less than traditional ones - not least because there are large quantities of them waiting to be imported from countries such as the US and Canada where transgenic crops have been adopted wholeheartedly. Add to this the additional costs likely to be entailed by traditional growers (such as segregation and labelling requirements), and the likely price gap between GM and non-GM products could be substantial.

The researchers set out to assess how such a potential development would influence consumers' purchasing decisions, concentrating on a product where there is a high possibility of GM ingredients - breakfast cereals.

The survey of over 2,000 respondents showed that the majority of UK consumers (71 per cent) would prefer to purchase non-GM breakfast cereal, with only 2 per cent saying that would be happy to do so. The remaining 23 per cent said they had no preference.

However, when asked if they would be willing to pay premium for the non-GM cereal - to cover the increased production costs - consumers took a decidedly less rigid stance. In fact, the number of respondents who said they would buy only non-GM products dropped from 71 per cent to just 56 per cent, while the number of 'don't know' responses rose from 4 per cent to 22 per cent.

In other words, "a premium for non-GM foods would encourage a significant proportion of consumers to choose lower-priced GM foods and make some consumers' preferences about GM/non-GM indeterminate",​ the study's authors suggest.

But this was not the only revelation of the research. A further question asking consumers how much of a premium they would be willing to pay for non-GM products revealed that "the percentage of respondents in the UK who are willing to pay a premium decreases as the size of the premium is paid"​.

For example, when the premium was set at around 5 pence per pack, just 13.9 per cent of respondents said that they would not buy non-GM food, but when the premium rose to more than £1.70, more than half (55.9 per cent) said they would consider buying food which was not GM-free.

The researchers also used the data to define two distinct groups of UK consumers - those who largely embraced GM foods and those who were motivated above all by price. The first group accounted for 13.3 of respondents and represents those people who would buy GM cereals even if they cost the same as 'regular' ones. The second group accounted for 13.6 per cent of respondents, and represents those consumers who would buy GM foods if it was considerably cheaper than conventional food.

Just under 27 per cent of respondents willing to buy GM foods may not seem like a particularly large figure, but it is likely to be encouraging for food manufacturers seeking future growth opportunities, and is in fact surprisingly high given the current anti-GM feeling in not only the UK but the EU as a whole.

But this potential market for GM foods is dependent as much on price as on science, and persuading consumers that transgenic food is safe to eat is likely to be only half the battle. Indeed, the report suggests that marketers may do better to avoid going down that route altogether, and that appealing to British consumers' wallets, rather than their concerns over safety, is likely to prove a far more effective means of promoting GM products in the longer term.