Valuing food safety improvements using willingness to pay.

Food safety policies are coming under increasing scrutiny. A challenging issue when devising food policies is to assess the 'intangible' benefits such as a reduction in suffering from food-related illness. Here, contingent valuation is used to elicit individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for the elimination of the risk of poultry-borne illness through irradiation and a hypothetical treatment. Two hundred members of the general public were interviewed and the results show that people are willing to pay extra for food safety. WTP is found to be sensitive to the elicitation format.