Canadian consumers’ attitudes have changed during the coronavirus pandemic: according to a new study on plastic food packaging, while the number of Canadians that avoid plastic packaging has remained more or less the same, fewer people are now concerned with the environmental repercussions of their shopping habits, mainly because they associate safety to takeout and home delivery. Furthermore, the use of single-use plastics has grown by between 250% and 300%, and the government’s plans to ban single-use plastics have been postponed.

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In South Africa, a group of women-owned wine businesses are criticizing the government for not being supportive of black-owned wine businesses and wine industry transformation during the coronavirus pandemic. More in particular, the businesses were trying to raise awareness on the daily challenges that the black-owned businesses encounter in the wine industry, mostly generated from the fact that, since they are first-time-rounders, they do not own any generational wealth. Therefore, the group demanded access to infrastructure, production facilities and land to grow their own grapes.

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Some of the issues determined by the coronavirus pandemic on the food supply chains affected many countries at the same time, without distinction. For example, since many coffee shops were forced to shut down, a side-effect of the pandemic was the oversupply of milk (that’s why gallons of milk were dumped due to the disrupted supply routes). Furthermore, excess in stock and changes in market demand brought farmers to dump eggs and let crops decompose because of a lack of facilities to store them and the difficulty in redistributing it. Finally, staffing shortages, changes in shopping habits and unused food stocks were three other commonly spread disruptions.

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European farmers are hardly selling grains, because there is sufficient storage space available (harvest volumes this year have been below average), so there is no immediate need to sell. Therefore, wheat exports were considerably lower than last year (only 1.9 million tons of wheat have been exported; down 47% year-on-year). For what concerns prices, they are generally not very high for wheat, while maize prices will increase as analysts have adjusted the expected maize harvest in Europe downwards by 2.6 million tons to 64.6 million tons.

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Bangladesh’s Ministry of Food has taken steps to assess the stocks of grains in the country, prompted by the soaring prices of rice that took the authorities by surprise, because the government had announced that since production during the last season was significant, there would not be any shortages (according to the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute’s estimations). More in particular, it entrusted the Directorate General of Food to ask all field offices to visit millers and traders and send reports on the stock of paddy, rice, wheat and flour within 5 days.

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Pakistan is still short of 1.5 million tons of wheat, but according to the Competition Commission of Pakistan (an independent agency of the government that enforces economic competition laws in Pakistan) this situation can be overcome without importing additional supplies, by withdrawing from wheat flour mills the permission to extract 65% of flour and 35% of bran and other products from wheat: this would determine the immediate availability of 1.5 million tons of wheat flour. Furthermore, the Competition Commission recommended the government to stop fixing minimum wheat support price, which allegedly creates circular debt in the food sector.  

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India’s current leadership envisioned a USD 5 trillion economy: in order to achieve this objective, agriculture development is paramount. Backed by government’s initiatives, agriculture start-ups are developing innovative, tech-friendly solutions: for example, cloud computing could be used by farmers for crop management via software-as-a-service applications, and new platforms are being developed to enhance data collection. Furthermore, internet of things technologies will connect different devices across the country in order to provide data-based insights, and the monitoring processes will be streamlined through the use of smartphones and tablets.

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Indoor farming and food processing plants in the UK are transitioning to implement industrial internet of things devices and building automation systems to ensure that crops grow with the maximum efficiency. Such new technologies allow them to monitor temperature, ventilation, humidity levels, lighting and the concentration of specific gases in order to improve food quality and safety as much as possible. All these factors can be managed automatically where controlled-environment agriculture is needed (mushroom farms and vertical farming, for example), thanks to building automation systems.

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Food production was seriously compromised in Africa because of the coronavirus pandemic, and incomes have been lost; however, a far more devastating welfare consequence of the global pandemic could be reduced access to food. The integration of regional economies represents one way to alleviate the food security issues in the continent, but it cannot be achieved without sufficient data on food prices and the appropriate support for investment in production, infrastructure and capabilities. What is needed to achieve this objective is a more integrated agricultural system with coordinated public policy responses that include also small and medium-sized farmers.

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During the first seven months of 2020, banana exports from Ecuador have increased by 8.09%, totalling 230.32 million boxes, thanks to an increase in exportable supply and an increase in demand from different markets. According to the Banana Marketing and Export Association, the European Union was the main destination for the fruit, with 28% of the total shipments, while sales to the United States, East Asia and Oceania all decreased.

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