Agriculture has relevant particularities that make this sector different from other economic activities. These frameworks imply the need for adjusted strategies and make the agricultural policy among the most important public interventions to correct, namely market failures. This is one explanation of why, for example, the CAP (common agricultural policy) is the most famous policy in the European Union context. The aim of this chapter is to carry out an assessment of the agricultural policies' impacts from, specifically, the Covid-19 pandemic. Statistical information from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) database for the period 2018-2021 was considered for agricultural support and producer protection. It seems that in specific contexts agricultural policies could have a more relevant contribution to support the farmers dealing with the challenges created by the pandemic.
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The frameworks created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis have had consequences on several domains of economies and societies, such as agriculture (Cao et al., 2021) and respective strategies (Patyka et al., 2021). But they bring also relevant insights for several stakeholders, including agricultural policymakers (Adhikari et al., 2021), for a more balanced development (Kumar et al., 2021), to rethink the farming systems (Popescu & Popescu, 2022) and the supply chains (Yovchevska, 2021).
The recent international events added difficulties to old problems faced by governments, public institutions and international organisations (Anderson, 2022). These shocks promote changes in the policies (Ewert & Loer, 2022), require modifications in the agricultural initiatives paradigm (Cheng et al., 2022) and involve adjustments to the new realities (Ker, 2020), through more robust measures (Munonye et al., 2022). In any case, the implementation of regulations is always subject to several constraints, including institutional and organisational (Gascón, 2020).
Agricultural policies have a crucial role in the current dynamics of the agricultural sector (Baležentis et al., 2021) and rural areas (Espinoza Lastra et al., 2021). Particularly to support the associated activities (Gurbuz & Ozkan, 2021) to deal with the respective impacts (Varshney et al., 2021) and avoid setbacks in the achievements attained (Harris et al., 2020).
However, the design of the respective instruments is not an easy task (Vik, 2020), namely in the contexts such as those from the European Union with a great heterogeneity of realities (Alfaro-Navarro & Andrés-Martínez, 2021). To deal with the impacts on the food and agricultural sectors, OECD nations implemented economic support and emerging countries adopted market and trade strategies (Gruère & Brooks, 2021). Additionally, in the policy design and implementation processes, choices have to be made (Sánchez et al., 2022), but these decisions generally do not satisfy all stakeholders (Belasco & Smith, 2022).
The effectiveness and adequacy of the interventions on agriculture are generally a challenge for the institutions involved (Jiménez & Saldarriaga-Isaza, 2022). This happens because many factors often the results and effects obtained are not equal to those expected and projected ex-ante (Ali et al., 2020) by the related institutions (Srairi, 2021), or at least are not considered socially fairer (Hoanga et al., 2021).
For effective implementation of agricultural policies, the process of design is decisive and here the availability of information (Ali & Imran, 2021) and scientific research insights (Neganova & Chistyakov, 2020) are crucial, namely for the European Union (Scown et al., 2020) and Chinese (Wang et al., 2020) contexts. The consideration of local and specific particularities and bottom-up approaches (Bisht et al., 2020) are fundamental for the policy success (Bezáková & Bezák, 2022) and a more adjusted development (Leakey et al., 2021).
Agroecology, among other approaches, may offer a set of opportunities for policymakers to promote a more sustainable and resilient food supply and farming systems (Altieri & Nicholls, 2020). The resilience of the agri-food chains and food security (Jouili & Elloumi, 2022), the digital transition (Kondratieva, 2021) and the respective approaches (Zysk et al., 2022) are discussions in the order of the day.