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To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7976.2009.01158.x Byline: Glynn T. Tonsor (1), Ted C. Schroeder (2), Joost M. E. Pennings (3), James Mintert (4) Abstract: Food safety concerns have had dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets in recent years. We examine consumer preferences for beef steak food safety assurances. We evaluate the extent to which preferences are heterogeneous within and across country-of-residence defined groups and examine the distributional nature of preferences with respect to marginal improvements in food safety. Using mixed logit models, we find that consumers in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States have willingness to pay preferences that are nonlinear in the level of food safety risk reduction. In particular, consumers in Japan and Mexico have preferences that are convex and consumers in Canada and the United States have preferences concave in the level of food safety enhancement. Les inquietudes entourant la securite alimentaire ont eu des repercussions considerables sur le marche du betail et le marche des aliments au cours des dernieres annees. Nous avons examine les preferences des consommateurs concernant l'assurance de la securite alimentaire de la viande de bOEuf. Nous avons evalue dans quelle mesure les preferences des consommateurs etaient heterogenes au sein de groupes etablis selon le pays de residence et entre ces groupes, et avons examine la nature distributionnelle des preferences a l'egard des ameliorations marginales de la securite alimentaire. L'utilisation de modeles logit mixtes nous a permis d'etablir que la volonte de payer des consommateurs du Canada, du Japon, du Mexique et des Etats-Unis etaient non lineaires lorsqu'il etait question de diminuer le degre de risque concernant la securite alimentaire. Les preferences des consommateurs du Japon et du Mexique etaient convexes, tandis que celles des consommateurs du Canada et des Etats-Unis etaient concaves lorsqu'il etait question d'accroitre le niveau de securite alimentaire. Author Affiliation: (1)Assistant Professor, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, 317-B Agriculture Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824 (corresponding author: phone: 517-353-9848; fax: 517-432-1800; e-mail:gtonsor@msu.edu). (2)Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University, 219 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506 (phone: 785-532-4488; fax: 785-532-6925; e-mail:tcs@ksu.edu). (3)Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the AST Professor of Marketing & Decision Sciences at Wageningen University, Tongersestraat 53, Room B1.13, 6211 LM Maastricht, The Netherlands (phone: +31-43-388-3934; fax: +31-43-388-4875; e-mail:joost.pennings@finance.unimaas.nl,jme.pennings@mw.unimaas.nl). (4)Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University, 218 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506 (phone: 785-532-1518; fax: 785-532-6925; e-mail:jmintert@ksu.edu).

Byline: Renee B. Kim (1) Keywords: Food safety; Risk management; KORUS FTA; Consumer trust; BSE concerns Abstract: As the issue of food safety became one of the important public agenda, consumer concern for food safety became the general public concern. The Korea U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) completion allowing import of U.S. beef to Korea has turned into a massive public uproar and a series of demonstrations, revealing widespread concerns on the part of Korean producers and consumers about government food safety regulations and mishandling of the beef trade requirement. The mishandling of public concerns for BSE on U.S. beef import by the administrators led to a breakdown of the relationship between the public and the government and a loss of consumer confidence in Korea's food safety system. The KORUS FTA beef crisis raised the issues of government accountability and the importance of understanding moral and ethical aspects of food safety management that pose perceived risk for BSE by the Korean citizen. The aim of this paper is to address the importance of understanding consumer concerns, food ethics and of appropriate risk communication in dealing with politically and publically sensitive food safety issues. This is achieved by assessing the factors that contributed to the conflict between the Korean government and the Korean public over the KORUS FTA beef agreement. Author Affiliation: (1) School of Business, HanYang University, Seoul, South Korea Article History: Registration Date: 14/10/2008 Accepted Date: 10/10/2008 Online Date: 01/11/2008

Introduction Agriculture, like all sectors of industry, is operating in a climate of change. Change is occurring in international markets, in domestic markets, in government protection and in consumer requirements. [...]

The emergence of pathogens in today's world has increased the need for new, portable, nonthermal sterilization technologies. The University of Missouri, Columbia in cooperation with the Institute of Electrophysics, Ekaterinburg, Russia, have built and tested a new accelerator based on solid-state opening switches for the disinfection of pathogens in food. The accelerator utilizes a new solid-state opening switch to generate 40-ns, 200-ke V electron beam pulses. These pulses were then converted to Bremsstrahlung X-rays using an integral X-ray converter. The efficacy of treating E. coli O157:H7 in ground beef was tested by irradiating frozen ground beef with the high-dose-rate [10.sup.7-8] rads/s X-ray pulses. Comparison studies were also done with a Cobalt-60 source located at the Missouri University Research Reactor. The results of the study are presented in this paper. Index Terms--Accelerators, Brehmsstrahlung X-rays, disinfection, E. coli 0157:H7, electron beam, high voltage, modulator, reprate, sterilization.