A multi-country assessment of consumer s acceptance and willingness to pay for genetically modified foods and the implications for new labeling system - The cases of vegetable oil and tofu

This paper estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) for non-genetically modified (GM) vegetable oil and tofu in Korea by using contingent valuation (CV) method and compares this WTP with Japan, Norway, Taiwan and the U.S. It also recovers the distribution of WTP by using a bootstrapping approach to provide a better measure of consumer s WTP on non-GM foods. Especially, we pay attention to the different characteristics of vegetable oil and tofu; vegetable oil made from GM soybeans doesn t have genetically altered protein, but tofu made from GM soybean has genetically altered protein. For this reason, vegetable oil made from GM soybeans is excluded from mandatory GM labeling system in Korea. Therefore, in this paper, the potential differences between WTP for non-GM vegetable oil and non-GM tofu are also investigated in order to evaluate the questions regarding the relevance of the introduction of new labeling system in Korea.