Personal shoppers, popularly known as daigou, have encountered a serious change and a typical challenge in the type of orders they used to receive from the Chinese customers on the perishables as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak.
President of the Australia-China Daigou Association, Dr Mathew McDougall, said that milk powder usually accounted for half of the orders, but demand has dropped drastically due to customers’ prioritized health product preferences.
He noted that lockdown of cities and border restrictions around some regions have interrupted the normal supply chain for daigou trade.
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Dr McDougall stated further that since traders avoiding to send perishable items, their demands would likely to remain truncated until the situation gets resolved.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a Chinese city which sells fish and meat from other animals, including bats, snakes and pangolins, was implicated in the spread of the virus and has infected more than 45,000 people besides claiming more than 1,100 lives.
According to a report by Rabobank, a global leader in food and agriculture financing says that disruptions are being experienced across the entire F&A (food and Agri) supply chain.
The report further stated that the virus has had a large impact on out-of-home dining in the country since its outbreak at the peak of 2020 Chinese New Year activities.
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Tim Hunt, General Manager of Rabobank’s Food & Agribusiness Research and Advisory (FAR) Division said that Chinese consumers are still eating but transportation was the main concern. And, the problem is that getting food to them is becoming a difficult exercise as logistics aren’t working well right now.
However, Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire said that no person had contacted the virus in the country and also Africa.
Ehanire said that the two cases tested so far were negative and that Nigeria has established three laboratories to confirm any such possible case of Coronavirus.
