The media impact of animal disease on the US meat demand

Consumers are sensitive to food safety problems such as the outbreak of animal diseases. This paper examined the impact on consumers' consumption behavior from information about food safety reported in news media. Taking avian influenza outbreak as an example, we counted articles published in major newspapers in the United States between 2001 and 2009, and included variables constructed based on these counts in an Inverse Almost ideal Demand model using monthly market consumption data on chicken, duck, other poultry, beef, and pork to estimate the impact of news on actual demand of these meats. We found that U.S. consumers would reduce their poultry demand and substitute by livestock meats when such news is reported by media negatively. This effect is boundary-unconstrained, i.e., the U.S. poultry market suffers irrespective to the country of the disease outbreak. However, the magnitude of the effect is lower if the outbreak is from overseas.