Consumer acceptance and rejection of emerging agrifood technologies and their applications

Abstract

Food insecurity represents a major global challenge. The development and application of agrifood technologies as routes to ‘sustainable intensification’ of agrifood production may improve local and national food security. This paper will consider societal responses to various agrifood technologies. Consumer non-acceptance of enabling agrifood technologies, and their products, is an important barrier to their commercialisation. Case studies (pesticides, genetic modification of plants and animals, nanotechnology in agriculture, nutrigenomics in nutrition security and synthetic biology) are considered along a temporal axis (from the 1950s to the present). Experts and regulators have increasingly recognised the importance of the role of risk and benefit perceptions. The normative assumption that consumers are ‘anti-agrifood technology’ is rejected.