Characterisation of the European Union Meat Sector Before and After the Pandemic

Introduction

Since 2019/2020 the world assists to, at least, two great international shocks with impacts that spread over the diverse domains of human life (Mignogna et al., 2022). The pandemic is one of the most impactful international occurrence (Chatellier et al., 2022). The implications on the several dimensions of the markets were effective (Vall Castelló & Lopez Casasnovas, 2021), namely in the prices, with consequences for the supply and demand sides, including in the international trade (Das & Samanta, 2021).

The behaviour of the consumers and households was affected by the lockdowns (Morávková et al., 2022) and this had implications on the levels of food consumption (Górska et al., 2021b), including meat (Górska et al., 2021a). The pandemic impacted food consumption behaviour (Skotnicka et al., 2021) and health conditions (Yazlcl et al., 2022), but the diet also had implications on infections (Schaalan et al., 2022). With or without Covid-19 the behaviour of consumers among the different social groups is not equal. In general, young consumers are more concerned with their health and this is reflected in their consumption decisions (Wojciechowska-Solis et al., 2022).

The prices of some food products (such as meat, fish, seafood and vegetables) were more affected (Akter, 2020) than others. The structure, organisation, diversification and dimension of the food supply chains were decisive for the success of the farmers, specifically the smaller ones, during the lockdown (Benedek et al., 2021). The resilience of the agri-food sector played also an important role, including that of the meat chains (Grinberga-Zalite et al., 2021). The food chain coordination and cooperation among the partners make the difference to take advantage of opportunities (Fleming et al., 2021). The African Swine Fever brought additional disruptions to the meat sector and markets (Duflot, 2021).

On the other hand, the conjuncture created by the pandemic and the associated risks for human health, for example, boosted the solution of old problems (Ban et al., 2022). The food sector is always associated with risks of contamination with micro-organisms and respective diseases, particularly incorrectly prepared meat (Mihai et al., 2022). This is a context in which the scientific community brings relevant knowledge in terms of analysis and evaluation (Bastin et al., 2022). In turn, the food processing facilities in certain regions and countries have experienced outbreaks (Dasgupta & Finch, 2020). The workplaces are often environments of outbreaks, increasing in this way the risks of transmission (Ingram et al., 2021). In any case, the ways the workers are contaminated are not always clear (Mallet et al., 2021). The pandemic does not affect the whole population in a similar way (McClure et al., 2020).

Considering this framework and the discussion about the production and consumption of meat (Dagevos & Verbeke, 2022), including during the pandemic (Losso et al., 2021), it is intended here to assess the European Union meat sector before and during the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis. For that, statistical information from the Eurostat (2023) database was considered and the Stata (StataCorp, 2017a, 2017b; Stata, 2023) software procedures were considered to obtain some results. The information taken into account is relative to the following dimensions: bovine meat; pigmeat; meat of sheep and goats; poultry meat. Scopus (2023) data were taken into account. To better understand the data, normalised values ((x_i-x_minimum)/(x_maximum-x_minimum)) were found.