Dar seafood ppp standard

4.2 Impacts of food-borne illness in Australia

Consumers typically respond to outbreaks of food-borne illness in seafood by reducing their demand for seafood products. For example, following contamination of NSW oysters in 1997, NSW consumers immediately reduced their demand for oysters by 85 per cent. They also immediately reduced their demand for all seafood products by 30 per cent, indicating that consumers readily generalise a specific seafood risk to the broad category of seafood products¹¹.

However, despite consumers’ immediate reactions to outbreaks of food-borne illness, demand for seafood recovers over time. Notwithstanding 24 outbreaks associated with raw-ready-to-eat seafood¹² during the 1990s, consumer demand for seafood has increased steadily over the medium term¹³. The implication is that while consumers immediately perceive costs when outbreaks of food-borne illness occur, these short-term costs are not sufficient to outweigh the perceived benefits of seafood to consumers over the medium-term.
Each outbreak of food-borne illness imposes an immediate cost on industry, by reducing sales revenues for the implicated product and with follow-on effects to the seafood industry more generally¹⁴.