It is important to understand if the increases verified by the consumers in the agricultural and food prices have their sources in the agricultural productions increased costs or in the food chains costs/speculation. In this way, it is proposed to assess the European Union agricultural producer markets before and after the pandemic. Data from the Eurostat were considered over the period 2016-2021 for the following producer prices (euros): soft wheat – prices per 100 kg; durum wheat – prices per 100 kg; maize – prices per 100 kg; rice – prices per 100 kg; soya – prices per 100 kg; tomatoes in the open: all qualities – prices per 100 kg; lettuce in the open: all qualities – prices per 100 kg; carrots: all qualities – prices per 100 kg; onions: all qualities – prices per 100 kg; and dessert apples: all varieties – prices per 100 kg. There are visible impacts from the pandemic on the producer prices, but they are not equal across the different production.
TopIntroduction
The Covid-19 pandemic has had impacts on our lives (Ronaghi, 2022) in diverse ways (Cariappa et al., 2022) and may get worse old problems (Ibiyemi & Oldewage-Theron, 2022), including those from global warming (Koo et al., 2021) and China–USA trade crisis (Wu & Turvey, 2020). The efforts to improve food security were annulled by the restrictions measures to control the infection (Merchant et al., 2022).
The contexts created by these international and exogenous shocks have been influenced by several factors, such as social media (Bansal et al., 2020) and public opinion (Liu et al., 2022). On the other hand, the perceptions about the effects of the pandemic differed among countries, regions (Helfenstein et al., 2022) and locations (Hammond et al., 2022).
Agriculture is fundamental for the economic development of any country and this was visible during the pandemic (Srairi, 2021). The agricultural and food prices when rising affect the nutritional conditions (Ivascu et al., 2021), namely of the populations with fewer incomes (Boughton et al., 2021). The reductions in agricultural prices have implications for the farmers’ income (Harris et al., 2020) and sometimes are accompanied by higher production costs (Uddin et al., 2021), because of rises in input prices (Vatta et al., 2022). The pandemic had impacts on agricultural prices (Ceballos et al., 2021) volatility (Yan et al., 2021) and sales volume (Pilvere et al., 2021), because of disruptions (Ejeromedoghene et al., 2020) and reluctance in the supply chains (Selim & Eltarabily, 2022).
These implications call for adjusted policy interventions (Nugroho, 2021), particularly in more vulnerable communities (Ghosh-Jerath et al., 2022), to minimise the effects on the farmers (Pieter et al., 2022) and to deal with the connectivity of the markets (Tanaka & Guo, 2020). The new technologies and artificial intelligence may produce innovative insights to better support the farmers (Peng et al., 2021), including the internet (Zheng et al., 2022), to achieve adjusted prices (Kumar, 2022), as well as resilience and organisation of the farmers (Lopez-Ridaura et al., 2021).
The resilience and dimension of the supply chains have also their importance (McBurney et al., 2021), particularly to deal with lockdowns. In medium and long supply chains there are more operators to add value to the prices, beyond the producers (Mila et al., 2022). The Russia-Ukraine conflict created additional challenges for these markets (Feng et al., 2023).
However, in some circumstances were not identified relevant impacts from the pandemic on the agricultural markets (Hambardzumyan & Gevorgyan, 2022). In other cases, these consequences were identified as temporary (Wang et al., 2020). In addition, agritourism, for example, seems to have attracted more customers during the infection outbreak (Zawadka et al., 2022). The management of the pandemic’s impacts on several economic sectors, including agriculture, allowed to avoid more dramatic consequences, nonetheless the concerns with the environment seem to persist (Edwards et al., 2022).