|
IFPRI ReportVolume 18, Number 2
|
|---|
Why Are Diets changing in Asia?
In the last three decades, economic growth in some Asian countries has been accompanied by dramatic declines in grain consumption and jumps in the consumption of meat, fish, and dairy products. These changes are usually attributed to increased household income and changes in the prices of food. But in 2020 Discussion Paper 11, entitled "Structural Changes in the Demand for Food in Asia," Jikun Huang and Howarth Bouis suggest that these new eating patterns may also be due to the changes in tastes and lifestyles that occur as countries become more urban and industrial.
Untangling these structural effects from the effects of changes in income and prices is tricky, because changes in tastes and lifestyles are closely related to changes in income. Nonetheless, Huang and Bouis suggest a number of reasons, apart from changes in income and prices, that people may change their eating patterns as they move from rural to urban areas. Urban markets may offer a wider variety of foods; urban residents may be exposed to more foreign foods; increased employment opportunities for women in cities may cause people to consume foods that are easier to prepare; urban residents, whose jobs tend to be more sedentary, may require fewer calories than rural residents; city dwellers do not usually grow their own food and thus do not have to choose between consuming the food they have grown and selling it to buy higher-cost foods. As economies undergo structural changes, these factors may change eating patterns in rural areas as well.
Using data from Taiwan and China, Huang and Bouis show that structural changes in food demand can be important factors driving rapid changes in dietary patterns. In Taiwan, structural factors appeared to explain why each urban resident consumed nearly 37 fewer kilograms of rice and 25 more kilograms of fruit than each village resident. In China, urban residents consumed from 5.8 to 9.3 kilograms more meat, fish, and dairy products per capita than rural residents, when incomes and prices were held constant.
It is still not clear, however, just how much diets will change as structural shifts take place in Asian economies. To predict, for example, to what level rice consumption is likely to decline as Asian countries continue to urbanize and industrialize, more information is needed on the causes of these structural changes in eating patterns.
