Published on June, 26th, 2020
First results from the survey on the impact of COVID on the agrifood sector with wide stakeholder participation, what is reflected in the diversity of responses.
Little by little, we are getting used to the new normality and the changes caused by COVID19 crisis that started three months ago. This situation has altered the annual planning of many productive sectors. At CREDA, we were concerned about how the people in the agrifood sector with whom we usually work and collaborate, were being affected by this crisis and how we could contribute to map and show their situation. We launched a survey to assess the impact of the pandemic on the different agents from production to marketing, the changes they were undergoing in their activity and the measures that they adopted to counteract negative impacts on their activity. The poll was launched on April 24th and was open of a month, obtaining 335 valid responses through snowball sampling both in our social networks (twitter, whatsapp …) and the producers’ networks with which we collaborate in CREDA projects. It must be emphasized the support from the Escola de Pastors de Catalunya, the UVic Chair in Agroecology and the cooperative Arran de Terra, in spreading the initiative.
Up to 70% of the 335 responses correspond to the primary sector and 30% to the rest of the supply chain: the wholesale trade (6%), retail (6%) and processing industry (18%).
Graph 1 Responses distribution by sector type
The primary sector responses (70%) are similarly distributed between livestock farming (47%) and agriculture (52%) (figure 2). Regarding the livestock sector, the highest share of responses corresponds to ruminant cattle (cows, sheep and goats), largely thanks to the responses obtained from the producers with whom we collaborate in other projects as well as to the cooperation with the aforementioned institutions and entities that helped disseminating the survey.
Graph 2 Distribution of responses according to type of farming (a), livestock types (b) and type of crops (c).G
N (a) = 230 N(b) = 109 N(c) = 119
Source 2 Own elaboration based on data from the Impact Survey of COVID19 on the agrifood sector. CREDA-UPC-IRTA. 2020.