It is important to create a picture of the main implications of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis on the evolution of this sector. This research has as its principal objective to highlight implications from the most recent events in the European Union dairy sector. Statistical information from the Eurostat database was considered over the period January 2019-October 2022 for variables related to milk production and dairy products: raw cows' milk delivered to dairies; raw cream delivered to dairies (in milk equivalent); drinking milk; cream for direct consumption; milk and cream powders, excluding skimmed milk powders; skimmed milk powder; concentrated milk; acidified milk (yoghurts and other); butter (including dehydrated butter and ghee, and other fats and oils derived from milk; dairy spreads); and cheese from cows' milk (pure). These variables were not significantly changed with the pandemic and recent crises.
TopIntroduction
All economic sectors were impacted by the recent international events (Chen, 2021), as well as health conditions (Miller et al., 2022). The negative consequences from the Covid-19 in the supply circumstances of the dairy sector (Abhijit et al., 2021) and on the demand side (Aiswarya & Bhagya, 2021) were also visible, particularly in the beginning (Hambardzumyan & Gevorgyan, 2022).
The effects of the pandemic on the different countries, regions, producers and groups of the population were not equal (Mumena, 2020), including for the dairy framework (Nikooyeh et al., 2022). In some cases, such as the French organic milk cattle farms, the impacts were null or moderate (Perrin & Martin, 2021). In any case, the disturbances in the dairy businesses promoted alternative approaches (Mishra & Shukla, 2022).
The higher costs of milk production, lower milk prices (Bhandari et al., 2021) and lack of operating capital (Qingbin et al., 2020) were identified as some of the factors that contributed to the problems in the sector during the pandemic, with changes in the competitiveness (Bórawski et al., 2022). The levels of organisation and resilience of the sector influence the adjustments in production (Dugué et al., 2021) and income availability affects the consumption of milk and dairy products (Nohra et al., 2022). The environmental impacts from the sector continue to be a concern (Kumar et al., 2021).
In turn, the pandemic highlights the relevance of milk products for the human diet (Guzel-Seydim et al., 2021) and health (Nili et al., 2022), as well as for food security (Prasad & Kothari, 2022), namely in the children (Sodri et al., 2021). In fact, dairy products are important to improve oral well-being (Farias da Cruz et al., 2022) and to prevent the severity of the pandemic (Ali et al., 2021). These products also contribute to reduce the odds of Covid-19 (Darand et al., 2022) and prevent viruses (Salama et al., 2022), as healthy functional foods (Flis et al., 2022), with health benefits (Yilmaz et al., 2022).
In some circumstances, the consumption of dairy products increased during the Covid-19 constraints (Almeida & Almeida, 2021), including between the students (Aydin & Demir, 2022) and in other cases decreased (Hoteit et al., 2022). In any case, the pandemic changed the consumer daily habits (de Melo Souza et al., 2022), nutritional conditions (Quilliot et al., 2021) and behaviour towards food consumption (Ben Hassen et al., 2021) and management (Bogevska et al., 2022). These contexts were verified also among children and adolescents (Pourghazi et al., 2022).
These impacts created diverse difficulties in the agricultural and food chains, including in dairy value channels (Biswal et al., 2020) and specific markets (Panta et al., 2023). These challenges required solutions adjusted to each case and permanent monitoring to assess strategies that in many cases were innovative and intended to deal with the new contexts generated by the restrictions of the pandemic (Benedek et al., 2021). Nonetheless, the constraints in the agri-food chains are not new and were present in other previous shocks, such as the African swine fever (Chatellier et al., 2022).