How COVID-19 may disrupt food supply chains in developing countries

By T. Reardon, Marc F. Bellemare, David Zilberman. 2020

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

COVID-19 is spreading through the developing world. Many low- and middle-income countries are now reporting growing numbers of cases and imposing rigorous lockdown regulations in response, which impact all aspects of the economy. How will COVID-19 affect food-supply chains (FSCs) in developing countries? The evidence suggests that the impacts will be felt widely, but unevenly. Farm operations may be spared the worst, while small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in urban areas will face significant problems. Governments will have to develop policies to respond to these varied impacts to avoid supply chain disruptions, higher food prices, and severe economic fallout for millions of employees.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22991dba6e3f29f211cdf0fc61604881ee6f3396

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jo Swinnen
2. V. Erokhin
3. Tianming Gao
4. M. Maertens
5. T. Reardon
6. John C. Beghin

Citations in the corpus

• Viewpoint: The future of work in agri-food (2020, unknown): “5 Fragmented into many labor-intensive, informal, small and medium enterprises,17 AFS nodes often operate in clusters such as dense sets of food processing SMEs, scores of meal vendors at truck stops, and dense masses of wholesalers and retailers in public wholesale and wet markets (Reardon et al., ”
• Impacts of COVID-19 on Trade and Economic Aspects of Food Security: Evidence from 45 Developing Countries (2020, background): “In LDCs and developing countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the impact of outbreaks on the food security status of people is particularly severe in transitional food value chains, such as wet markets [141].”
• COVID-19 and global food security (2020, background): “Reardon et al. (2020) point out that the impacts will be greatest in informal-sector small and medium-sized enterprises, which are labor-intensive with high densities of workers in small spaces.”