Public Attitudes Towards Biotechnology In Argentina

Resumen

The importance of biotechnology in the economy and society is growing an its social effects more visible. Argentina has a strong scientific and technological tradition in biotechnology as well as agro-biotechnology quickly allowed the development of a new economic agricultural paradigm. The countryis for example one of the major producers of transgenic soybean in the world. However, there is littleactualized empirical evidence about the public acceptance of biotechnology in general, and on genetically modified organisms in particular. This presentation focuses on the structure of public attitudesregarding different applications of food biotechnology from a recent nationally representative surveyof the urban adult population. We evaluate news sources and trust in different social agents. We alsoexamine the perceived benefits and risks of biotechnology applied to food and study the compositionof attitudes with respect to the development of specific biotechnological applications used in vegetables and animals. We analyze eventual public attitudes on buying genetically modified food as well.Through multivariate models we segment the population into groups of acceptance-rejection andstudy the effect of socio-demographic variables as predictors of these attitudes.