Impact of COVID‐19 on agricultural production and distribution in South Asia

COVID-19 and prices of pulses in Major markets of India: Impact of nationwide lockdown

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost all the sectors including agriculture in the country. The present paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 induced lockdown on both wholesale and retail prices of major pulses in India. The daily wholesale and retail price data on five major pulses namely Lentil, Moong, Arhar, Urad and Gram are collected for five major markets in India namely Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad during the period January, 2019 to September, 2020 from Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Government of India. The Government of India declared nationwide lockdown since March, 24, to May, 31, 2020 in different phases in order to restrict the spread of the infection due to COVID-19. To see the impact of lockdown on price and price volatility, time series model namely Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model with error following Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) model incorporating exogenous variable as lockdown dummy in both mean as well variance equations. It is observed that in almost all the markets, lockdown has significant impact on price of the pulses whereas in few cases, it has significant impact on price volatility.

Analyzing the nexus of COVID-19 and natural resources and commodities: Evidence from time-varying causality

Even though a few studies have focused on natural resources and commodity sectors by considering the pandemic, they have only compared their status in pre-COVID19 to post-COVID19. None of the studies has directly examined the causal relationship between the pandemic, and natural resource index and the primary commodity-related sector indices. This study fills the gap of exploring the dynamic association between them by analyzing the causal relationship between the COVID19, and natural resources index and the primary commodity-related sectors (i.e., agribusiness, energy, and metals & mining) by applying a novel time-varying causality test on daily data from January 23, 2020, to November 12, 2021. The empirical results support the presence of time-varying causality from COVID19 to natural resources, agribusiness, energy and metals & mining. The results obtained from the rolling window algorithm support causal linkages between the variables however at several points it fails to capture the dynamics of linkages between the variables which is captured by the recursive window algorithm. The outcome is robust when the pandemic is proxied by either number of cases or deaths. Similarly, the findings obtained from heteroskedastic-robust specification also validate our findings. Several policy implications are further discussed in the study.

COVID-19 Pandemic-Induced Disruptions and Implications for National Food Security and Farm Incomes: Farm-Level Evidence from Indian Punjab

By using the data from a primary survey of 1100 farm households from Indian Punjab, the present study examined the impact of COVID-19 pandemic-induced disruptions on food security and farm incomes. The paddy-wheat-based production system showed resilience to the challenges of the COVID-19 situation. Farmers adapted effectively to the changed equilibrium and there was no decline in food production, land lease activity or cropping patterns. The disruptions in agricultural machinery services and input supplies led to a rise in the rent of machinery and input prices. Agricultural wages also jumped due to scarcity of agricultural labour. The study highlights no imminent threat to food supplies from Punjab and hence to national food security. It showed that farmers may need some financial support to counter the effect of rising costs of farming. There is a need to enhance the resilience of various input and output markets in agriculture in the future.