北海道大学 大学院農学院 修士論文発表会，2019 年 2 月 8 日

Japanese consumer valuation of agricultural working conditions
共生基盤学専攻 共生農業資源経済学講座 農業環境政策学 胡 林軒
Agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries, characterized by injuries involving
machinery (e.g., Kumar et al., 2000; Douphrate et al., 2009; Akdur et al., 2010; Robert et al.,2015), animals (e.g., Fox et al., 2015; Weaver et al., 2017; Tosswill et al., 2018), pesticides (e.g.,Loewenherz et al., 1997; Curl et al., 2002) and other chemicals (e.g., Jeyaratnam et al., 1987;
Calvert et al., 2008; Zeljezic et al., 2015; Munoz-Quezada et al., 2018), weather, and others(McCurdy and Carroll, 2000). In addition to these health and safety problems, workers inagriculture are also suffering from human rights violations. Due to the large demand for cheap
unskilled workers, the agriculture sector is a major destination for victims of human trafficking(Cavalieri, 2000; Buckland, 2008; Kumar, 2013; Lockwood, 2018).
Compared with the impact of agriculture on the natural environment, limited attention has
been paid to the working conditions of agricultural workers. Consumers are willing to pay apremium on agricultural products to express their concerns and reduce the associatedenvironmental impact. However, it remains to be seen whether consumers are prepared to do
the same to improve the working conditions of agricultural workers.
In this study, we focus on consumer valuation of agricultural working conditions. We
anticipate that consumers’ valuation of agricultural working conditions, and how the valuation
changes, can be answered by the following four research questions: (1) To what extent areconsumers concerned about relative agricultural working conditions when purchasing foods?;(2) If consumers are given information about agricultural working conditions, how will theconcerns of consumers change?; (3) Do consumers’ concerns about domestic agricultural
working conditions differ from their concerns about foreign agricultural working conditions?;and (4) What kinds of people tend to care about agricultural working conditions?
We investigate consumer valuation of agricultural working conditions using a best–worst
scaling (BWS) analysis, plus a labeled discrete choice experiment (DCE). A total of 1032respondents living in the Tokyo metropolitan area answered our questionnaires online. They
were asked to answer the questions in the context of purchasing beef. Before the BWS analysis
and DCE, half of the respondents were given information on agricultural working conditions,whereas the other half were not; this is referred to as information treatment.
The results revealed that (1) among the seven food attributes listed, consumers are least
concerned about agricultural working conditions when making their purchasing decisions; (2) if
consumers are informed about agricultural working conditions, their concerns increase, but are
still the least important of the food attributes; (3) Japanese consumers are concerned more
about domestic than about foreign agricultural working conditions; and (4) older people withhigher education levels and greater altruism are more concerned about domestic agriculturalworking conditions, whereas younger people are more concerned about foreign agriculturalworking conditions.