Highlights

Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on agriculture

۳٫ Three potential mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of major crises and disasters on agriculture

۳٫۱٫ Developing crisis management plans and designing resilience-promoting policies

۳٫۲٫ The need to create and exploit community marketing schemes

۳٫۳٫ Can smart farming technologies and big data help farmers deal with major crises or disasters?

۴٫ Conclusions

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgments

References

Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak was an unprecedented situation that uncovered forgotten interconnections and interdependencies between agriculture, society, and economy, whereas it also brought to the fore the vulnerability of agrifood production to external disturbances. Building upon the ongoing experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this short communication, we discuss three potential mechanisms that, in our opinion, can mitigate the impacts of major crises or disasters in agriculture: resilience-promoting policies, community marketing schemes, and smart farming technology. We argue that resilience-promoting policies should focus on the development of crisis management plans and enhance farmers’ capacity to cope with external disturbances. We also stress the need to promote community marketing conduits that ensure an income floor for farmers while in parallel facilitating consumer access to agrifood products when mainstream distribution channels under-serve them. Finally, we discuss some issues that need to be solved to ensure that smart technology and big data can help farmers overcome external shocks.

۱٫ Introduction
COVID-19 appeared as a black swan, which puts at risk the lives of millions of people through its massive spread (Whitworth, 2020), simultaneously prompting new fears about the economic recession that is expected to follow the pandemic (Goodell, 2020; Snooks, 2020). After the identification of the first infections in China in December 2019, the virus began surging in other countries in February 2020 (Pedrosa, 2020). On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially announced the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic (WHO, 2020). To protect public health, governments around the world – even those whose leaders expressed denial of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic – initiated several measures (ranging from media announcements to partial or even complete lockdown) to mitigate the disease. These measures led to profound changes in consumers buying behavior and food consumption patterns, disturbances in transportation networks, and the closure of some food suppliers (Nakat & Bou-Mitri, 2020). Such an upheaval created uncertainty shocks that impacted every sector of social and economic life, including agriculture.