We investigate the causes of consumer uncertainty regarding storage of packaged foods by examining the characteristics of the consumers, the type of food products and packaging, and where the product was stored at purchase. Consumers' self-reported refrigeration practices from the 1998 Food Safety Survey are analyzed descriptively and by logistic regression. Eleven per-cent of the 2,001 respondents reported difficulty during the past three months in deciding whether to refrigerate a packaged food. When consumers do have difficulty, it is likely
National Sample Survey data on the unit values of a large number of foods can be used to compute price index numbers that can be compared with the official national price indices, the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers for rural India, and the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers for urban India. This paper finds that over the five years from 1999-2000 to 2004-05, the food component of the CPIAL understated the rate of food price inflation. This understatement can be attributed to the use of long outdated weights (from 1983), and the resultant over-weighting of cereals, whose prices fell relative to other foods. The overall weight of food in the CPIAL is also too large, so that the growth in the general CPIAL was understated during this period when food prices fell relative to non-food prices. Under conservative assumptions, the paper calculates that the five-year growth in the reported CPIAL of 10.6 per cent should have been 14.3 per cent. The nominal poverty lines are also understated. As a result, and ignoring other problems with the counts, the official poverty ratio of 28.3 per cent for rural India in 2004-05 should be closer to 31 per cent; at current rates of rural poverty reduction, this eliminates more than three years of progress.
Trends and patterns of consumption of value added foods in India
Michel Morisset, Pramod Kumar
7th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development December, 15-17, 2011
The economic growth, changes in tastes and preferences and urbanization has resulted in changing consumption pattern away from traditional food commodities to processed and high value commodities (Murty, 2000; Meenakshi, 1996; Rao, 2000). The consumption of food is falling because of shift in consumption away from cereals to high calorie commodities such as meat, milk, fish etc, in other words from low value to high value commodities (Kumar and Kumar, 2004; Meenakshi, 1996). In rural areas the shift in consumption pattern is more in those regions that are experiencing greater improvement in infrastructure (Rao, 2000). The changing consumption pattern has resulted in decline in per capita household demand for foodgrains (Radhakrishna and Ravi, 1992; Kumar and Mathur, 1996; Murty, 1999; Kumar and Kumar, 2003). However, there has been little attempt to assess the changes in consumption pattern by value added food products. The analysis of food consumption in Urban India is of greater interest. It permits not only to understand the food consumption pattern of an important and growing population but also reveals the future of consumption habits in India. It is considered that the changes in consumption are more likely to happen in urban than in rural India. Even more, it is among the urban population that the most important concentration of wealthy people are found and they are considered the most auspicious to introduce the new trends. An understanding of the changing consumption pattern according to the extent of value addition would have implications not only for foodgrains demand projection but also for development policies. It is therefore, pertinent to understand: what is the extent of shift? Has the consumption of value added products really increased, if yes, then to what extent? Is this shift observable across all the income groups of the populationand specially in urban India? To find solution to these, this study is undertaken with following specific objectives: 1) To study the food consumption pattern by expenditure groups for urban and rural India and across states for urban India; 2) To classify the food items in accordance with the level of processing and to analyse the trend and pattern of consumption of processed food; and 3) To analyze the consumption of the highest income group of urban households as symptomatic of future consumption pattern