Special collection of articles on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on South African agriculture

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a disruptive impact on the world economy and the lives of all people. The pandemic is characteristic of a typical “Black Swan” event with unprecedented scope, characteristics, consequences and responses by governments in all countries. The legislative constraints imposed by governments in most countries on the movement of people and goods and services disrupted the global economy dramatically with large negative impacts on the growth and absolute size of economies. Although agricultural and food production across the world was deemed an essential service for the basic needs of people, the sector did not fully escape the disruptive impact of the pandemic.

It is, therefore, no surprise that the global scholarly community did not waste time in producing research papers, opinion pieces and special issues of journals to document the causes, experience, impact and other dimensions of the pandemic which continue to be top of mind since early 2020.

The scholarly community in agricultural economics was also quick to respond with numerous papers and journal special issues to document government responses, food security, supply chain, food systems and poverty impacts of COVID-19. Some examples are:

• American Journal of Agricultural Economics: A series of special collections of articles on COVID-19 published in several issues of the journal in 2021 (Vol 103: Issue #1 to Issue #5).

• Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics: Special issue published as Vol 68 (2) June 2020

• Agricultural Economics (Journal of IAAE): Special issue published as Vol 53 (3), May 2021

• Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy: Special issue published as Vol 43 (1), March 2021

• Agricultural Systems: A number of special issues published in 2021: Issue 185–188.

Agrekon followed our international peers and invited contributions for a Special Issue in early 2021. The submissions that were received covered events during the pandemic up to middle 2021. The collection of articles published here provides a useful reference and comparative set of evidence to compare with the early assessments presented in the collections of papers mentioned above. The piece published in Food Policy by Gruere and Brooks (2021) provides a summary of government measures implemented in the agricultural and food sectors across 54 OECD countries and is a useful benchmark for the collection of papers on the South African case published here.

The first paper by Meyer et al. documents the timeline and the various measures implemented by the South African government starting in March 2020 to combat the spread of the virus. These unprecedented actions by the government also necessitated the introduction of other measures to mitigate the negative impact of the lockdown rules and other regulations which are all documented in this paper.

The impact of these interventions on the agricultural sector globally played out in three main arenas (Gruere and Brooks, 2021):

• Impacts on agricultural production

• Shifts in consumer demand

• Disruptions to the food supply chain.

All the papers in this collection deal with different elements of these three impacts. The first paper by Meyer et al. analyses the impacts on agricultural production from a macro and sector-wide perspective, based on interviews with key stakeholders. The second paper by Meyer and Reardon and others implements a deep dive into the nature of food supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic. While the first paper charts only limited impacts on production, this paper clearly illustrates the constraints experienced by the stakeholders in the supply chain and how they had to change their way of doing business to ensure that disruptions are contained to the minimum.

The paper by Davids, Vink and Cloete provides a detailed analysis of the impact on the wine industry, which was undoubtedly the sector (grape producers, wine cellars, distributors and retailers) that were the hardest hit by the idiosyncratic nature of South Africa’s lockdown rules by banning all alcohol sales and trade for long periods in 2020 and 2021.

The final paper by Wegerif provides a more micro perspective of production impacts as it specifically applies to black farmers. These small farmers, who have just entered commercial agriculture after years of exclusion from the industry experienced the impacts of the pandemic differently than their large commercial counterparts.

Together these four papers provide a very first analysis of the impact of the pandemic on South African agriculture and food supply chains. Taken together, they form a very useful benchmark and basis for future more detailed and granular analyses to document the impact of regulations, decisions and assistance measures so that lessons can be learned for future reference.