Consumer preference for fish safety inspection in Bangladesh

Abstract

Consumers are entitled to eat safe food, so authorities should ensure that this right is preserved by enacting regulations and ensuring compliance through enforcement activities. Safety inspection is key to the enforcement system. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of consumer responses to a regulatory scheme for safe seafood. The regulations consist of national and local authority enforcement and subsequent follow up activities to ensure that all wild and farmed fish in all product formats are safe. We collected primary data from two major cities in Bangladesh, Dhaka and Chittagong. The data were analysed using conditional and generic multinomial logit models to identify different utility ratios. We find that consumers expect safety control information at a low mental cost or effort. They value fish safety inspection highly in their affective reaction, whereas this value is lacking in their cognitive response. The individual parameter estimates show that consumers' preferences for both wild and farmed fish are significantly positive. They are most likely to reject frozen fish and be willing to pay less for it. Wild-caught fish creates utility for consumers without any food safety inspection, but this is not the case for farmed, frozen fish. The lack of authorised food safety inspection significantly decreases utility, suggesting a positive market potential, particularly for farmed fish with local authority safety certification.