The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on West Romanian Crop Production in 2020

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting public health crisis had an enormous impact on the global economy and its sectors. Most components were adversely affected, especially the tertiary industry (the part of a country’s economy that provides services), with different types and sizes of businesses suffering to varying degrees. Reports on the impact on agriculture are not lacking, and the crisis was perceived and responded to differently from the supply chain to the household level. The research question proposed in this paper concerns the impact of the early restrictions induced by COVID-19, namely the lockdown period from March to June 2020, on Romanian agriculture and more precisely Western Romanian crop production. Two counties in the West were selected: the county Timis for its highly favourable agricultural production and the county Caras Severin for its integrative agricultural production centred on mixed farms, where crop production is integrated with animal production towards a higher added value. Using secondary data from the National Agency for Payments and Interventions in Agriculture allowed the disaggregation of data at the level of each municipality for 2019 and 2020. The choice of this dataset was related to the level of precision, as the beneficiaries of direct payments in the respective areas are verified each year for both areas and crops. The paired two-tailed t-test was used to test the data for each LAU 2 municipality in each of the selected counties; as the crops sown in 2019 could not be affected by the COVID lockdown period in spring 2020 (March to June), the most important spring crops in terms of area in 2020 were selected and tested against the 2019 datasets. The results show that there is not enough evidence to conclude a significant statistical difference between the two years, and therefore, we cannot reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the pandemic lockdown did not affect the spring crops during their most restrictive period in spring 2020; thus, the overall influence of the COVID-19 lockdown on crop production in Western Romania was insignificant, observed only at the level of primary production. Spring crop production could have been severely affected by the restrictions imposed by the health crisis on access to certain inputs, freedom of movement for field work, and other activities closely linked to agricultural production, leading to early disruptions along the food chain.