Potential Impact of Agro-terrorism Perceptions on Demand for Locally Grown Products

The economics of agroterrorism has not been fully developed within the economics literature, yet with increasing concerns about agroterrorism it is important to understand how consumers will generally respond. This paper presents an overview of food safety issues, and develops an economical model that can be used to illustrate and establish hypotheses regarding consumer behavior and agroterrorism. We then present sample and econometric results from a survey of 304 New Jersey consumers and explain the characteristics of the 33% that confirmed that they have increased purchases of locally grown produce due to terrorism fears.