FAO.org

Unlike any other crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted food value chains at all levels (production, processing, logistics and even consumer behaviour to name a few). The impacts vary across countries and are constantly changing with the spread of the pandemic as governments, stakeholders and other actors in value chains adopt and implement a broad spectrum of measures to manage the spread of the virus and mitigate its impacts on food insecurity and poverty.

The present brief reviews secondary information pertinent to the impacts of COVID-19 on dairy producing/processing cooperatives, and their coping strategies, with a view to developing policy recommendations that focus on food loss and waste reduction. Toward that end, this brief reviews the issues in the context of two countries with large and small dairy cooperatives, namely the Republic of India and Japan. It makes use of secondary information structured in a manner to highlight the impacts of the pandemic and the measures adopted by cooperatives to mitigate its impacts at different levels of the value chain and reduce loss and waste. In view of the importance of the interventions of governments across the entire value chain, the policy brief provides an overview.