CONSUMER ENTNOCENTRISM ON GLOBAL FOOD MARKET

The aim of paper is to give review of scientific researches about consumer ethnocentrism as highly exploited theme in current situation of globalization and loss of ethnic identity. Consumer food ethnocentrism is kind of aversion that consumers feel towards all food products from export. There is strong correlation between economic development and consumer ethnocentrism with consequence of GDP increase, unemployment decrease and balancing of foreign trade deficit. Several factors have been identified that determine or are closely related to consumer ethnocentrism and can be divided into four categories: socio-psychological (cultural openness, patriotism, animosity, dogmatism), economic (consumers' income, economy development, price and income elasticity), political (political propaganda, political history etc.) and demographic (age, gender, education). The research results confirm that the level of consumer ethnocentrism differs from country to country, but also between country's regions and that level changes over time, as the factors that determine ethnocentrism changes. Consumer ethnocentrism can be one of the drivers of agriculture and food processing industry development in Croatia, but it is not enough, especially in conditions of low purchasing power and unemployment. In such circumstances, consumers pay more attention to the price than to the country of origin. Therefore, the price competitiveness of Croatian food products should be increased in relation to prices of foreign food products.