LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 7A: CONSUMERS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
ket price. Based on a utilitarian approach, which refers to the sum of the utility of a certain good to society, a
stated preference method was used to estimate the marginal benefits utility, i.e. a contingent valuation
method (CVM) (Mitchell and Carson, 2005). In the current study, some improvement in elicitation format
was applied to reduce the potential for bias in responses which is always a possible criticism of CVM. Many
environmental economists agree that CVM is a highly developed survey approach for non-market valuation,
using trained interviewers and involving extensive use of visual aids such as maps, photographs and charts to
acquire the closed estimation of WTP and mirror real customer behaviour in the actual market (Hanley et al.,
2001; Mitchell and Carson, 2005). In combination, the LCA and CVM approaches may be useful to determine
the strategic direction for the Malaysian poultry industry to ensure the effective distribution of financial
allocation to support development of food production that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.
2. Methods
Life Cycle Assessment: The assessment of environmental burdens from a total system involved in the life
cycle of a product were taken into account, from resources extraction through the processing of raw materials
(i.e. crop cultivation and the mechanisation used, feed and feed additives manufactured), utilities consumption
(i.e. transportation, water, gas and electricity) and waste disposal (manure, gaseous emissions and substances
derived from manure) as well as manure as a fertiliser credit. In this study, poultry manure from the
intensive systems could be used as plant nutrients to offset the synthetic fertiliser that would otherwise be
required for growing crops. LCA was employed through the use of specialist software, namely SimaPro (version
7.3.2, PRé Consultants, Amersfoort, Netherlands) to evaluate the environmental impacts of three different
broiler production systems, namely an intensive closed-house system (CH; typified by confinement of
birds indoors in relatively large flocks with environmental control), an intensive open-house system (OH; as
for CH but without a controlled environment due to the open sides of the building) and a semi-intensive system
(SI; unlike the previous two systems, it uses unimproved genotypes, very small flock size, simple housing
and provides access to range). A functional unit (FU) of one tonne live weight of broiler chickens was
chosen, with cradle to farm-gate as a system boundary and focusing on a single product output (the model
was such that no allocations were necessary) with an attributional approach, since the motivation of the study
was based on the technologies provided in different production systems. Four midpoint impact categories
were considered, namely energy use, global warming, acidification and eutrophication which contain multiple
types of burdens. Most burdens are aggregated into potential for causing impacts using a specific characterisation
factor, i.e. Global Warming Potential (GWP), Acidification Potential (AP) and Eutrophication
Potential (EP). For example, the characterisation factor of CO2 is 1, and the GWP value resulting from 1 kg
of CH4 and N2O are 25 and 298 times respectively higher than CO2. Time constraints meant that the potential
impact of changes in land use was not considered in the current study. Foreground data from nine broiler
farms, three farms for each of the three different production systems, and one breeder farm were obtained
from sources in the poultry industry and the Government of Malaysia. In addition, background data from the
Ecoinvent database (Ecoinvent Centre, Dübendorf, Switzerland), covering the processes and services of
products were applied.
Contingent Valuation Method: The structure and essential components of most Contingent Valuation
(CV) questionnaires consist of five steps, namely i) setting up the valuation scenario; ii) introducing the
payment vehicle; iii) eliciting valuation; iv) validation; and v) collecting socio-demographic and economic
characteristics. The valuation scenario contains the critical part of the CV, namely the establishment of the
hypothetical scenario which defines and creates the justification to value the good; a process of describing
the potential consequences from the changes of the good and the institutional setting which provides the
information on the implementation, delivery and monitoring actions to the public. A plausible mixed payment
vehicle of a voluntary nature based on a price increase was used in the survey (Pearce et al., 2002). A
series of validation follow-up questions were asked in order to understand the motives for the answer given
and to help identify any potential bias. The final element of the questionnaire asked for socio-demographic
and economic information of the respondents, which was used to confirm the theoretical expectation towards
WTP (Mitchell and Carson, 2005). The face-to-face survey was employed in four regions with a total of two
hundred and ten respondents recruited, comprising 27, 93, 60 and 30 persons respectively from the northern,
central, southern and eastern regions of Peninsular Malaysia. The respondents could be anyone as long as
they consumed chicken in their diet and were aged between 21 and 56 years of age. Statistical differences in
WTP value between respondents from different regions were explored using appropriate statistical tests including
analysis of variance (ANOVA). Various association and correlation tests were performed to identify
593