Disruption in Global Food Supply Chain (FSCs) Due to Covid-19 Pandemic and Impact of Digitalization Through Block Chain Technology in FSCs Management

Zerin Tasnim

doi:10.7176/ejbm/12-17-08

Abstract

The different pandemics that humanity had experienced, such as the Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola, and Swine Flu, had a great impact on the global economy, the environment , social lifestyle, agricultural sector, manufacturing and service industries, hospitality and tourism, education sector, aviation industry etc. Currently, humanity is facing another pandemic, the infection of the new coronavirus known as COVID-19. The objective of this paper is to present a theoretical review of supply chain disruption due to COVID-19 impact, analyze and discuss the effects of this turbulence in global food supply chain management. For the analysis, various contents from published articles, blogs, reports, newspaper publications have been collected. There was sufficient evidence to affirm that the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 has an important effect on global supply chain management process. The purpose of this paper was to highlight the reasons of disruption in global supply chain management especially in food supply chain management. This paper also has depicted the long term impacts of COVID-19 in food supply chain management. By analyzing various documents, few policies and steps were suggested to apply for managing global supply chain management in post pandemic era. Finally it was suggested to implement digitalization in the platform of block chain technology to build-up a robust and sustainable global supply chain management to handle any such situation arise in the future. Keywords: Supply chain management, COVID-19, Global food supply chain (FSCs), Digitalization, Block chain technology DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-17-08 Publication date: June 30th 2020

Highlights

A local health authority in Wuhan, China alert people as several pneumonia cases outbreak due to some unknown causes that was later assumed to initiate from a Huanan sea food market, on December 31, 2019 and as a consequence the market was shut down by January1, 2020 (Huang et al, 2020).It spread out very rapidly in entire Wuhan region though was disregarded by the political leaders of other part of the world (Washington Post, 2020).To lessen the spread, Wuhan was kept under lockdown starting from January 23, 2020 and the lock down officially ended on April 8, 2020
The number of confirmed cases quickly doubled worldwide by mid-April through community transmission and reach up to 2 million of confirmed cases at around 200 countries (ECDC 2020). Both Hong Kong and Singapore could able to manage the accelerant speed of Covid-19 confirmed cases by adopting strict lock down policy, early government steps and by maintaining social distancing ( Anderson et al, 2020)
FSCs Should Be More to Digitization In current pandemic situation many physical shops like clothing and shoe stores, restaurants, cosmetic stores, stationary and book stores have closed down for unlimited time

Summary

Introduction

A local health authority in Wuhan, China alert people as several pneumonia cases outbreak due to some unknown causes that was later assumed to initiate from a Huanan sea food market, on December 31, 2019 and as a consequence the market was shut down by January1, 2020 (Huang et al, 2020).It spread out very rapidly in entire Wuhan region though was disregarded by the political leaders of other part of the world (Washington Post, 2020).To lessen the spread , Wuhan was kept under lockdown starting from January 23, 2020 and the lock down officially ended on April 8, 2020 This lockdown includes home and regional quarantine, travel ban.

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