Repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic in the food supply chain

Abstract

Due the difficulties of SCs during the pandemic, in some cases, demand has increased, while in others it has dropped, causing cascading disruptions, this thesis initially investigates the gaps in the scientific literature on the consequences of pandemics in SCs. The main output of this study was a research agenda for COVID-19 confronting, which highlighted that the pandemic poses severe risks to food security, such as the risk of increasing hunger and malnutrition, which motivated the direction of the thesis for food supply chains. Then, the second step was to understand the reality of Brazilian family agribusiness in the context of the pandemic (farmer's view). To this end, two small producers and the president of a cooperative of family farmers in Rio de Janeiro were interviewed. The results indicate that during the pandemic, the temporary closure of street fairs hampered the flow of production from small producers. On the other hand, this difficulty ended up motivating the use of social media to sell production. Finally, the last study investigates food SCs from the consumer's perspective through a survey on the eating habits. Our results indicate the deterioration of eating habits during the pandemic