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Published on October 24, 2007

There are also indications that US consumers lack understanding of which countries export certain products to their country, said Amplitude Research and the University of Michigan at Dearborn.

To test knowledge of country of origin, respondents were asked to identify the top two seafood exporters to the US. Overall recognition was reasonably good regarding Canada (38.5 per cent recognition) and China (48.2 per cent).

However, 47.3 per cent of respondents identified Japan and 20.7 per cent identified Norway as top-two seafood exporters, when in fact these two comprise small percentages of the export market. Only 15.6 per cent identified Thailand as a top exporter.

The study was conducted by Amplitude Research from October 5-9 among its consumer Web panel and had 1,000 respondents.

Amplitude Research is a non-profit organisation based in Florida.

The country-of-origin finding is part of the university's research on Americans' perceptions of "made in China" products.

The research showed that while most (55.2 per cent) agreed with banning im-ports from China until safety could be assured, another majority 53.6 per cent agreed that doing so would cause problems for the US economy.

While only 35.4 per cent of respondents agreed they could recognise products made in China when shopping, 47.8 per cent noted they had stopped buying some products after discovering they were manufactured in China.

The research also revealed 61.1 per cent agreed that because of the sheer number of products made in China, avoiding buying such products was not possible. Almost one in five respondents felt recent news stories about the quality and safety of Chinese imports unfairly portrayed China as the biggest offender.

The Nation