The Immediate Influence of a Food Safety Incident on Japanese Consumers’ Food Choice Decisions and Willingness to Pay for Safer Food

In January 2008, 10 people from three families living in Chiba and Hyogo Prefectures in Japan were found to be poisoned after eating frozen dumplings that had been imported from Tianjin, China. This incident had a big influence in the short term on Japanese consumers’ consumption choice of imported food from China as well as the willingness to pay (WTP) for food with higher safety guarantees. Using data from a Web-survey of 1500 respondents covering the whole of Japan, two regression models show that firstly, after the incident, consumers intending to buy Chinese food products reduced from 92.5% to 27.6%, and the change of purchase decision is mostly affected by consumers’ prior risk perception and attitude about Chinese products and presents a regional difference. Secondly, Japanese consumers are willing to pay 64,300 yen per year for safer food on average after the incident, and those whose purchase decision is influenced by the incident have a higher WTP of 54,000 yen than those who are not influenced. The most significant factor to decide the WTP is the framing of questions in the survey. The influence of demographic factors is less important and inconsistent in the two models.     

The Impact of Cormorants on Plant–Arthropod Food Webs on Their Nesting Islands

This study investigated the effects of cormorant colonies on plant–arthropod island food webs, the consequences of nutrient-rich runoff on marine communities, and feedback loops from marine to terrestrial ecosystems. Terrestrial plant responses were as expected, with the highest plant biomass on islands with low nest density and the highest nitrogen (N) content on islands with high nest density. In contrast to our hypothesis, we found no uniform density response across guilds. Among herbivores, the variable responses may depend on the relative importance of plant quality or quantity. As expected, nutrient-rich runoff entered water bodies surrounding cormorant nesting islands, but only at high nest density, and increased the density of emerging insects. This created a potential feed-back loop to spiders (major terrestrial predators), where stable isotope analyses suggested great use of chironomids. Contrary to our expectation, this potential feed-back did not result in the highest spider density on islands with a high cormorant nest density. Web spiders showed no changes in density on active cormorant islands, and lycosids were actually less abundant on active cormorant islands compared to reference islands. The variable response of spiders despite increased dipteran densities, and also in other consumer groups, may be due to direct negative effects of cormorants on soil chemistry, vegetation cover, and other density regulating forces (for example, top–down forces) not studied here. This study highlights the importance of including processes in the surrounding marine ecosystem to understand the impacts of seabirds on the food web structures of their nesting islands.