Food Safety vs. Allegiance to Ranchers: Canadian Consumer Response to Three BSE Events

The proposed project uses an exceptional dataset to quantify Canadian consumer response to BSE (mad cow disease) during 2002-2005. Consumers, food industry firms, and government agencies on both sides of the border profess deep concern with food safety in general and with BSE in particular, but BSE has the added feature of also being viewed as a volatile cross-border trade issue. Hypotheses include identifying the portion of consumers who ceased buying beef after BSE events, identifying the extent to which consumers reduced beef purchases out of safety concerns or increased purchases in support of ranchers, testing for evolving consumer reaction as each new BSE event occurred, and testing for correlation between consumer response and proximity to Canada's leading beef producing areas. The methods involve performing regression analyses on a nationwide dataset of individual meat purchases by approximately 10,000 households over four years. The impact of BSE on the likelihood of purchasing beef, the quantity purchased, expenditures on beef, and relative preference for beef versus other meats will be tested while controlling for numerous other influences.