Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and locust swarm outbreaks pose a significant threat to global food systems, causing severe disruptions in both local and international food supplies from farm to fork. The main objective of this study is to understand and identify the disruptions during the crises and create a map of how resilience can be established to recover and sustain the food supply chain (FSC) functions as well as food security. The detrimental impacts of the compound crises on the FSC are explored and the effects of the affected areas are estimated under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. As a response to the disruption caused by the crisis in FSCs, reactive and proactive solutions are proposed to develop resilience at the food sector level. In the short term, the reactive solutions, consisting of smoothing the food demand, supply and delivery, and food production and processing, can be borrowed. In the long term, the proactive solutions can be conducted by developing multi-level short intertwined FSCs. Our comprehensive investigation of the resilience elements in diverse operations and potential strategies should contribute to the improvement of FSC resilience in the face of ongoing and growing threats.
Highlights
Received: 19 November 2020The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has caused the worst recession since the SecondWorld War [1]
Sustainability 2021, 13, 1063 response to the pressing food security problems, we address the following issues in this study: (1) how the food system will be affected, and (2) how to mitigate food security with a supply chain perspective
The results show that food security can be threatened by insufficient labor, transportation, farmers’
Summary
Received: 19 November 2020The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has caused the worst recession since the SecondWorld War [1]. The food industry is one of the most vulnerable sectors, and the populations living in food crisis contexts are exposed to the effects of the pandemic. Food systems incorporate all the stages of food production, from agriculture to household consumption [2,3]. Since the food supply chain (FSC) is becoming increasingly complex and multi-tiered, the accessibility of market factors, such as labor force and logistic resources, is vital for FSC functioning in the global environment. The COVID-19 outbreak, accompanied by mitigations, has exerted a synchronous negative impact on the FSCs. COVID-19 is not the only threat to FSCs. Since October 2019, the biggest locust invasion in almost three decades has broken out across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South America and threatened more than three billion people’s food insecurity [4]
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