Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought impacts on the food system in several ways, such as on the supply and demand of food or changes in consumer preferences. However, little is known yet about these effects but needs to be analyzed to define actions and policies for crisis mitigation and achieving food system resilience and food security. In this article, we estimate the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on changes in food consumer preferences in Colombia, applying a logit model approach for seven attributes, namely animal welfare, environmental sustainability, information on the origin and manufacturing of food, food appearance, food price, fair payment to the producer, and food packaging. In addition, we provide an analysis of changes in beef consumption during the lockdown, since the beef industry is among Colombia's most important agricultural activities and is heavily affected by substitution effects. Our results show that consumer beliefs regarding these attributes remained mostly stable, but that income is a determining factor for the decision to consume certain types of food, such as beef, rather than for possible changes in beliefs. This means that income ends up being decisive for the consumption of food such as beef and that, for its part, it does not have a greater weight in the change of beliefs of the people surveyed. The results will help the food system actors in defining interventions for achieving food security and resilience.
Highlights
The occurrence of COVID-19, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 10 2020, has brought profound social and economic disturbances
There is a high percentage of people who did not change their beliefs during the COVID-19 lockdown
These results are decisive, since they denote an important result: people have a high valuation of attributes and, in the face of the shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, most people did not change their preferences and beliefs
Summary
The occurrence of COVID-19, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 10 2020, has brought profound social and economic disturbances. The viruses’ high contagiousness and its impact on the numbers of patients with need for support from the health systems have caused the implementation of various prevention measures by the governments of most nations in order to control the spread of the disease, such as travel restrictions, changes in work and study places, social distancing, quarantines, or lockdowns, among others (Addisson et al, 2020; Deb et al, 2020; Warwick and Roshen, 2020) These measures, have caused different economic shocks, with a particular emphasis in developing economies. In the worst-case scenario, there could be a 10% increase of people living from less than US$ 5.5 per day in Latin American and the Caribbean (Sumner et al, 2020), highlighting the impact of the pandemic on the socioeconomic conditions of households and food security
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