Agricultural Economics and Development

Agricultural Economics and Development

Investigating the Role of Health-Orientation in Adoption of Healthy Salmon Production and Consumption in Tehran City

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 PhD Graduate in Agricultural Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
2 Professor of Agricultural Economics Department, University of Tehran Agricultural Campus, Karaj, Iran.
3 Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Economics and Development, University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran.
4 Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran,, Iran.
10.30490/aead.2025.367330.1644
Abstract
Introduction: Healthy food plays a very important role in maintaining and improving the environmental quality, which is a significant reason for taking the necessary measures to encourage people to consume healthy foods as well as to produce organic products. So far, there has been no comprehensive study conducted on the role of attitudes towards food safety among producers and consumers of organic products in Iran, especially, among farmers and consumers of farmed fish, while identifying the role of this factor can play a significant role in forming a market and raising the healthy fish in the country. This attitude is of great importance in determining and implementing policies and tools to expand the production and consumption of the healthy and organic products. Certainly, the policy applied to a person who cares more about the health of food than its price will be very different from that applied to a person for whom price is more important than health. Also, the policies will be different between health-oriented producers and price-oriented producers. Therefore, this study mainly aimed at investigating the extent to which the health-oriented attitudes will affect consumers’ willingness to pay more and farmers’ willingness to receive more for healthy fish consumption and production, respectively. Thus, it was necessary to analyze the factors affecting the behavior of the two main components of this market, namely producers and consumers, using scientific analyses, including the stated preferences approach based on opinion polls of samples from the consumer and producer communities. Therefore, the present study examined and analyzed the factors affecting the producer’s willingness to receive more money and the consumer’s willingness to pay more in this market using the ordinal logit model. It should be noted that the reason for using the word ‘healthy’ in this study was that due to the lack of farmers’ access to all organic inputs, it was not possible to speak with certainty about the organicity of the fish; and based on the conventional definition in various studies in similar conditions, the word ‘healthy’ was found to be frequently used instead of ‘organic’. 
Materials and Methods: In this study, the conditional valuation method was used to determine the factors affecting the consumers’ willingness to pay and the producers’ willingness to receive more for organic salmon products. Considering that the type of dependent variable in this study was discrete and sequential and had an order in classes and in fact showed different ranks of consumers’ willingness to pay additional costs, the ordinal logit model was used to examine the factors affecting consumers’ willingness to pay. According to the previous similar studies and the research literature, the variables such as age, gender, marital status, occupation, income, education, awareness of organic products, health-oriented attitude (more attention to price or product health), history of consuming organic products and lack of trust in product health certificates and the authorities issuing these certificates used to affect people’s willingness to pay more for buying the healthy fish; in addition, the factors affecting the producers’ willingness to produce the healthy salmon resulting in their higher income used to be examined. So, it was the case for this study. The dependent variable in this model was the different levels of producers’ desire to produce the healthy trout, which would be considered as a percentage of the total production capacity of the unit. The independent variables of this model, according to the research literature and the previous studies, were the level of education, producers’ experience, unit capacity, producers’ incomes, producers’ levels of awareness of the healthy or organic fish farming, and the health orientation index. Thus, the required data were collected in several sections. In the producer section, interviews were conducted with 45 producers active in the trout farming in Tehran. This number was selected from 137 active trout farms in this city and using the Cochran formula. In the consumer section, interviews were conducted with 598 Tehrani citizens. This number was also determined using the Cochran formula approach.
Results and Discussion: Given the lack of a healthy fish market in Iran, this study investigated the behavior of producers and consumers regarding this newly introduced product. Accordingly, using data obtained from interviews with 45 producers and 598 consumers in 2022, the factors affecting the producers’ willingness to receive more and the consumers’ willingness to pay more were identified using the ordinal logit model. The study results showed that the health orientation index would have a significantly negative effect on the producers’ willingness to receive more. Producers who cared more about the health of the fish than its price would also have a tendency to receive an additional charge less than other producers. The more an individual agreed with the issue that the health of the product was more important than its price, the probability of being in the first to third groups would increase by 4.3, 2.7, and 0.9 percent, respectively, and the probability of his presence in the groups four to six would decrease by 0.6, 2.1, and 5.2 percent, respectively. According to the results of the model of factors affecting the producers’ willingness to receive more, the variables of experience, education, income group, level of awareness, and membership in the cooperative would have a significantly negative effect on the producers’ willingness to receive more. People who believed that the health of the product was more important than its price in purchasing the products they need, were also willing to pay more to buy the healthy fish. If an individual’s agreement with the issue that  the product health was more important than its price in purchasing the desired product increased by one level, the probability of being in the first to third groups would decrease by 7.5, 4 and 0.2 percent, respectively, and the probability of his presence in the fourth to sixth groups would increase by 3.6, 2.1 and 6.2 percent, respectively. Also, according to the results of the model of factors affecting the consumer’s willingness to pay more, the variables of education, income group, employee job, level of awareness, number of times of consumption of organic products per month would have a significantly positive effect, and the variable of distrust index in the issued label and the supplier store would have a significantly negative effect on the individual’s willingness to pay an additional cost.
Conclusion and Suggestions: Considering the significant role of individual attitudes in choosing the healthy trout, both among the farmers and consumers, it is clear that farmers who care more about the healthy fish than its price tend to receive less additional charge, and the health-oriented consumers tend to pay more to buy this product. so, both groups have the necessary basis for forming a market for this product in Tehran. Therefore, it is recommended that policymakers pave the grounds for expanding the health-oriented attitudes among all members of society through social media, including radio and television broadcasts, written media, and active media in cyberspace, so that the culture of raising and consuming this healthy product in society increases and the basis for forming a market for this product is provided. Also, according to other study results, it is suggested that among others, training and advertising measures be taken to increase public awareness of the benefits of producing and consuming the organic farmed fish and the obvious and hidden harms of conventional farmed fish, enacting laws to require the use of health labels on food, and trying to reduce the price of organic food by providing health support subsidies and low-interest facilities, as well as providing documented training to the fish farmers to raise the organic fish.
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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 01 February 2025