SUPPLY CHAIN IMPLICATIONS FOR A NON-ZOONOTIC FOREIGN ANIMAL DISEASE

<b>Project Methods</b><br> To gauge the attitudes and sentiments of processors, semi-structured interviews (Creswell and Poth, 2018) will be conducted. During the first phase of interviews, processors will be asked about how livestock from foreign animal disease infected zones would be handled at the processing level. In the second phase, processors will be asked specifically about the pricing and contractual implications of feedlots as well as retail, wholesale, and foodservice marketing opportunities in the wake of an outbreak. It is the hope of these interviews will garner a better understanding of their perceptions of risk as well as making informed decisions as the consumer survey instrument is developed.This part of the study aims to have two large outputs to the knowledge gap: 1) processor opinions and perceptions about taking the risk transfer of recovered livestock for harvesting and 2) market possibilities for these meat products in downstream segments of the supply chain.Online Survey PopulationThe population of interest is consumers of U.S. beef and pork. The United States exports about 15 percent of its total beef production and 29 percent of its total pork production (USMEF, 2022). Since the United States is one of the top meat exporters in the world, we find it fitting to gauge the attitudes of these meat products with international consumers. We will work with the survey provider to collect samples from at least two of the top U.S. meat-importing countries.Online Survey InstrumentAn online survey will be developed to meet the objectives of this project. Nationally representative samples of 1,200 U.S. respondents and 1,800 respondents of two U.S. meat-importing countries will be given a survey instrument with questions pertaining to animal health and disease. Previous studies have examined import quality characteristics to international countries (Murphy et al., 2015; Tonsor, Schroeder, and Pennings, 2009). These numbers were generated based on costs as well as ensuring a large enough sample is collected for the variation in the experimental design. The budget line item assumes an up to $12 cost per domestic respondent and up to $25 cost per international respondent.Before the survey goes fully live, a pre-flight sample from each country of interest will be utilized. This pre-flight will us to calibrate questions or segments of the survey if problems occur. Respondents will be provided additional components such as a choice experiment and best-worst scaling. Choice experiments are used to determine the tradeoffs among attributes of meat products as well as empirically calculate premiums or discounts based on attributes. Best-worst scales are used to assess where consumers provide the acceptability of these meat products in various areas of the food supply chain.This segment of the study aims to have two large contributions to the knowledge gap: 1) consumer opinions and perceptions about meat from an animal disease outbreak and 2) the results of the choice experiment for meat attributes.Information TreatmentsAll respondents will be randomly assigned into two groups of information treatments before any survey questions. One of the groups will be provided a short video or paragraph explaining U.S. animal disease response and scientific studies showcasing the safety of meat harvested from recovered livestock. The other group will not be provided any of the previous mentioned information and will answer survey questions.Experimental DesignWe utilize a randomized complete block design with four blocks and a factorial treatment structure in the choice experiment. The four blocks will be a combination of the information treatments and livestock species of either beef or pork. The block combinations are as follows: no information and beef; no information and pork; information treatment and beef; and information treatment and pork.Choice experiments have long been a method to evaluate the importance of product attributes (Lusk, Roosen, and Fox 2003), especially when they do not exist in the marketplace. As well, choice experiments offer a way to evaluate consumer willingness to pay across attributes (Lusk, Roosen, and Fox, 2003).Within the choice experiment scenarios, there will be three attribute levels for each choice set. The three attributes selected for this experiment are: price, USDA grade, and origin. The non-price attributes will vary based on the design developing to analyze the main and interaction effects of each attribute. That is, not all non-price attributes will show up in the scenarios so comparisons can be made with the presence and absence of certain attributes. Prior to the choice experiment set, definitions of each product attribute will be displayed on a landing page to respondents.Best-worst scaling has been used within survey instruments to garner knowledge from respondents about their opinions toward food items (Caputo and Lusk, 2020). This approach is advantageous as respondents must make a tradeoff between preferences (Lusk and Briggeman, 2009) and it prevents a scale-use bias as some stated preference methods such as Likert ratings (Baumgartner and Steenkamp, 2001). In the context of this study, best-worst scaling will be utilized to get relative preferences for segments in the food supply where meat from infection zones may be tolerable to consumers.?