Impact of coronavirus disease 2019 on consumers’ perceptions of genetically modified food

ABSTRACT

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated significant economic loss and an unprecedented challenge to people’s livelihoods. Using household data collected in November 2020, this study shows that the COVID-19 outbreak has significantly affected consumers’ perceptions and consumption of genetically modified (GM) food in China. Their perceptions and purchase intentions have turned more negative, and their actual purchase of GM food has decreased after the COVID-19 outbreak. The study’s results also indicate that consumers with more knowledge of genetic modification technology are less likely to change their perceptions of GM food.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumer perception
• COVID-19
• genetically modified food
• purchase behavior
• purchase intention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

¹ Both indirectly processed GM agricultural products and products made with agricultural GMOs as raw materials, such as soybean oil, should be labeled in accordance with the Agricultural Genetically Modified Organisms Identification Management Measures issued in 2002.¹⁵.

² For simplicity, respondents answering “no idea” or “I do not know” are also classified into the neutral group. By considering it as a new group and replacing the ordered logit model with the multinomial logit model, we rerun all the models and obtain similar results.

³ We did not consider the availability of GM products after the outbreak of COVID-19. However, we believe that this limitation would not result in significant estimation bias since none of the sampled cities had been placed under full or partial COVID-19 lockdowns before we conducted the field survey.

⁴ Even though the results from Equation (1)(1) $Perceptio{n}_{i\mathrm{j}}={\alpha }_0+{\alpha }_{1}COVID-{19}_i+{\alpha }_{2}Individua{l}_i+{\alpha }_{3}Househol{d}_i+{\alpha }_{4}Othe{r}_{ij}+e_{ij}$(1) may be biased, we estimate Equation (1)(1) $Perceptio{n}_{i\mathrm{j}}={\alpha }_0+{\alpha }_{1}COVID-{19}_i+{\alpha }_{2}Individua{l}_i+{\alpha }_{3}Househol{d}_i+{\alpha }_{4}Othe{r}_{ij}+e_{ij}$(1) and discuss the estimation results (Tables 2 and 3) for two reasons. First, most previous studies ignore the endogeneity caused by omitted variables. Following this praxis, we compare our estimation results to those obtained by previous studies. Second, as shown in the next section, we obtain similar results by excluding the impact of time-invariant variables from the estimation (i.e., Equation 2(2) $\begin{array}{l}Perceptio{n}_{ij}={\vartheta }_0+{\vartheta }_{1}COVID-{19}_i\\ +{\displaystyle \sum _{j=1}^{j=3}\left({\vartheta }_{2j}Produc{t}_i+{\vartheta }_{3j}Produc{t}_i{}^{*}COVID-{19}_i\right)}\\ +{\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^{i=N-1}I}{D}_i+\tau ijt\end{array}$(2) ).

Table 2. Impact of COVID-19 on consumers’ perceptions and consumption behavior.

Table 3. Marginal effect of COVID-19 on consumers’ perceptions and consumption of genetically modified food.

⁵ Due to data availability, the impact of other variables that vary between 2019 and 2020, such as income, is omitted. Previous studies show that the COVID-19 outbreak has reduced income.^16,17 In addition, consumers’ perceptions and consumption of GM food become negative as income increases.⁹ Hence, the omitted variables may lead to an underestimation of the impact of COVID-19.

⁶ We communicate the correct answers after they answer these five questions.

⁷ Except for age, the estimated coefficients on the high school and above education dummy and age are all significant with p-values lower than 1% in all the information source equations.

⁸ Further research shows that the marginal effects of the COVID-19 outbreak for consumers whose perceptions and purchase intentions of GM food are positive (i.e., strongly approve, approve, and neural) decrease, while the marginal effects for consumers with negative perceptions and purchase intentions of GM food (i.e., oppose and strongly oppose) increase.

⁹ The north dummy is added to reflect the fact that people in north China consume more soybean oil and less papaya.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71773150), The National Key Program on Genetically Modified New Varieties (2016ZX0815001, 2018ZX08015001).