Research Reports
The Impacts of Beef Grading System and Policy Suggestions
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AuthorJeon, Sanggon
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Publication Date2009.11.01
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Original
The purpose of this study is to check whether the information about beef grading system is correctly informed to the domestic consumers. In addition, this study evaluates the current beef grading system how much domestic consumers are satisfied with the current beef grading system. By consumer survey, this study asks the consumers to answer how much they know the current beef grading system. In the survey with many questions, we can assess the current beef grading system in terms of consumers' satisfaction. Based on the survey results, this study suggests several policy recommendations on the current beef grading system to increase the consumers' satisfaction on the current beef grading system.
Survey results show us that there are several problems with regard to current beef grading system, which lowers consumers' satisfaction on beef grading system. First, only 24.5 percent of the interviewees know the current beef grading system correctly and the others do not know the grading system in details. Second, 26 percent of the interviewees know the meaning of the sings of A, B, C that indicate the quantity of beef. Others misunderstood these signs as the indications for beef quality. Third, the first reason why consumers check beef grade is that they want to check the safety of beef through the grading system. But, the current beef grading system is nothing to do with food safety. On the contrary, the HACCP is the regulation that controls meat safety. Lastly, many consumers need information on food safety in consuming beef such as whether the cattle is feed with anti-biotics, GM feed grains, hormones and etc.
To increase the consumers' satisfaction on beef grading system, this study suggests several policy recommendations. First, the current beef grading system is too complex for the consumers to know the exact meaning of the current system. Therefore, the current regulations on beef grade should be expressed in simple way so that general consumers may know easily the exact meaning of beef grading system. Second, the government and people who has something to do with livestock industries have to increase their more attention to inform the consumers of the correct meaning of various regulations such as the HACCP, the law of labelling origins of food, cattle and beef history traceability inculding beef grading system. In the long run, new regulations will be needed to reflect the consumers' request for making a new law that confirms the food safety.
Simulation results analyzing the impacts of changes in consumer's preferences on marbling in beef grading system show that market price and welfare could be affected by the changes of consumers' preferences. The degree of the impacts of those changes depends on the share of consumers in each grade and the market share of each grade.
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