Pork Safety in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC)

Consumer Willingness To Pay a Premium for Safer and More Hygienic Pork: An Experimental Study in Vietnam

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Abstract

Vietnam has been a development success story transforming from one of the world’s poorest nations to a middle-income country in the last three decades. As wealth has increased, so has meat consumption, and so also has consumer concerns over food safety. Pork is the most highly consumed animal source product in Vietnam, and most of it continues to be sold in traditional or wet markets. Numerous studies have found high levels of microbial contamination of pork sold in both traditional and modern retail. While modernisation is often seen as the solution to food safety, research shows this not to always be the case. Moreover, traditional value chains are preferred by customers and provide many additional livelihood, equity, and psycho-social benefits. The International Livestock Research Institute and partners had research food safety in traditional markets for two decades and we argue that upgrading wet markets is possible a superior alternative to replacing them. However, upgrading requires investments and must be driven by incentives. We therefore conducted an experiment to see if consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for safer, cleaner, pork could be leveraged for upgrading traditional pork value chains.

Keywords: willingness-to-pay, safety, pork

How to Cite:

Ngo, H., Dang-Xuan, S., Lindahl, J. F., Unger, F., Nguyen-Viet, H. & Grace, D., (2023) “Consumer Willingness To Pay a Premium for Safer and More Hygienic Pork: An Experimental Study in Vietnam”, SafePork 14(1).