Analysis of Consumer Perceptions on Food Purchasing During COVID-19 Pandemic in Bangladesh

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic creates a worldwide problematic situation as well as Bangladesh which secures the top ten GDP growths in the last decade. Since this country has an agriculture dominated economy, this pandemic badly affects on the agricultural business sector. However, the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic may vary from different parts of Bangladesh. To visualize those effects on the consumers' points of view, this research has been conducted for measuring the different points of pandemic affects on 10 different agricultural products. A survey has been designed to collect the consumers' perception to buy agricultural food during this pandemic and a total of 200+ valid data was selected for analysis. Data has been randomly collected from all over the country having a prioritized location with a higher COVID-19 detection rate. Respondents shared their viewpoints on 10 different agricultural products type named as Coarse Rice, finer quality rice, beef & mutton, poultry & egg, local fish, exported fish, fruits & vegetables, cooking oil, spice crops, and imported foods. The data are statistically analyzed to answer three research questions regarding food availability, price hiking, and the government's initiatives to mitigate the impact of this pandemic. It has been found that almost every consumer reports comparatively higher pricing and a lack of agricultural products in the domestic market. All the data are negatively skewed for pricing in terms of any cities in Bangladesh, which means every consumer suffer from the price hiking during this pandemic. It also depicted that the food crisis was more dominated in the capital city rather than the remote local villages, which may happen due to the supply chain disruption of perishable products. However, the government already took some initiatives to mitigate the effect of this pandemic, but more thanthemajority of the respondents are not fully convinced of that. An interesting finding is that the crisis issue is not significantly dependent on any consumers' demographic data, which means every category of consumers already more or less affected by the pandemic.