Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted meat production, supply chain, and meat prices that caused a severe socio-economic crisis worldwide. Initially, meat and meat products' prices increased due to less production and increased demand because of panic buying. Whereas, later on, both meat production and demand were significantly decreased due to lockdown restrictions and lower purchasing power of the consumers that results in a decrease in meat prices. In early April 2020, meat packing facilities started to shut down due to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus among workers. Furthermore, meat producers and processors faced difficulty in harvesting and shipment of the products due to lockdown situations, decrease in labor force, restrictions in movement of animals within and across the country and change in legislation of local and international export market. These conditions adversely impacted the meat industry due to decrease in meat production, processing and distribution facilities. It is suggested that the integration among all the meat industry stakeholders is quite essential for the sustainability of the industry's supply chain to cope with such devastating conditions the future may hold. This review aimed to discuss different aspects of the meat industry and supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic and proposed some future directions.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected many sectors of life, taking a huge toll on the economy but the livestock industry, such as global meat production and supply chain
In the US, the shutdown of processing plants began on March 27, 2020, with the closing of poultry processing facilities followed by a cascade of closing of beef, poultry, and pig processing facilities over the couple of weeks. These closings led to reduced slaughter and processing capacity and a 45% decline in pig processing, with a similar impact on other meat production species being observed [4, 24], studied the impact of a pandemic on American and Brazilian meat sectors and demonstrated that meat processing was incredibly disruptive during April and May 2020 due to the virus outbreak at slaughtering facilities resulting in an extraordinary rise in livestock prices
Many people choose the online platform for the sale and purchase of animals on such occasion that was new for them, which again created problems. All these situations showed an adverse effect on meat supply chains during COVID-19
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected many sectors of life, taking a huge toll on the economy but the livestock industry, such as global meat production and supply chain. Meat production and processing were compromised due to difficulty of purchasing production inputs such as feed for animals, restrictions of transportation of live animals including seasonal border crossing restrictions, accessing professional services and workforce, Effect of COVID-19 on Meat Production and restrictions in supplying meat and meat products to the markets [1,2,3] These problems caused a drop in capacity for meat production and plants’ processing, resulting in decreased sales conditions that slowed down market activity [4]. During this COVID-19 pandemic, there was a decrease in governmental capacities to prevent, control and treat animal diseases.
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