ABSTRACT
In the post-epidemic era, the trend of digital transformation on consumer services has promoted the fresh industry model upgrade and changed the food market space, and then given rise to diversified life demands. As the significant frontier for the spread of COVID-19 in China, the Wuhan food market is a microcosm of the changes in China's urban space, which is worth pondering. This study interpreted consumers' perception and identity in the food market from the perspective of consumer behavior and explained the connotation development of urban consumer service spatially, taking Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China as the case. The results showed that COVID-19 affected consumers' perception and emotional attitudes toward space, through the direct action on those behaviors and wishes, and reconstructed the spatial identity of Wuhan food markets in the post-epidemic era. In this era, consumers' perception of the food market was being more multi-dimensional and optimistic. They showed less sensitivity to the authenticity of traditional farmers' markets, while more interest in new retail spaces featured with leisure and sociality, such as fresh supermarkets and hypermarkets. They also emphasized more group space identity of small-scale community-level markets. From the Chinese case to the global perspective, this study proposed that the development of urban consumer services in the post-epidemic era was diversified and changeable, while the authenticity and stability of local food culture provided a flexible and extended space for such changes. The results and conclusions of this study will help to identify the Chinese characteristics and trends of consumer behavior in the post-epidemic era and provide a reference for the quality of living and the planning of urban spatial development, and provide China's case for global economic and social recovery after this epidemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
ABSTRACT
Traditionally, food sustainability has been considered solely in the stage of agricultural production. However, globalization, the expansion of the food production industry, and the emergence of supermarket chains that control the retail food market require specific significant changes in supply chains in the food sector and, therefore, we need to address the economic, social, and environmental impacts of these events. On the other hand, social selling has increased rapidly in recent years, with a further boom, following current events related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This explosion of social sales, where there are usually no control and regulation entities, can bring problems associated with mishandling items. In this paper, we expose how Blockchain technology supports the traceability of social sales by validating the data provided by the chain participants such as digital health passports, production and transport data in the sale process;the proposed solution generates recommendations on productmanagement considering the agreements previously made by the network actors. To evaluate the proposed smart contracts, we useHyperledger Caliper, obtaining an average throughput of 12.6 transactions per second and an average latency of 0.3 s for the asset update process. We also use a study case to evaluate the proposed project platform's selling-transport stage using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a pathway for the creation of a just and equitable food system in South Africa that contributes to achieving the right to food and livelihoods for all. It is based on years of ongoing research on food systems in South Africa and Tanzania as well as a current research project on the impact of COVID-19 regulations on food systems in South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania. The chapter starts with looking at the challenges of the food system in South Africa, the problematic approaches to addressing these challenges and how the situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. Then it explores a different way of looking at and transforming the food system that moves away from the focus on corporate driven solutions and applies a different lens to analysing who the stakeholders are. The argument is for the advancement of economic actors identified by where they sit on the intersecting continuums from more marketised to more socially embedded, from more elite to the subaltern, and from larger to smaller scale. This lens makes it clear which type of enterprises and economic actors need to be supported and the alliances that need to be built to create a pathway to a better food future in the urbanising South African society and perhaps elsewhere as well.
ABSTRACT
Food markets around the world have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic via consumer behavior upended by fear of infection. In this article, we examine the impact of disclosing COVID-19 contact tracing information on food markets, using the restaurant industry in China as a case study. By analyzing transaction data at 87 restaurants across 10 cities, we estimate difference-in-difference (DID) models to ascertain the impact of COVID-19 infections and contact information tracing on economic activity as measured by a daily number of transactions. Empirical results show that while the overall number of new COVID-19 infections at the national level caused a dramatic drop in numbers of transactions in all restaurants, restaurants in cities that disclosed contact tracing information of COVID-19 infections experienced a 23%-35% higher number of transactions than the ones in cities that did not disclose such information during the recovery period. Ultimately, we show that in the absence of a shelter-in-place mandate, disclosing contract tracing information to mitigate consumers' uncertainties about risks of being infected can contribute to a faster recovery of food markets, in addition to reducing COVID-19 infections.
ABSTRACT
Ensuring food security is a strategic goal of any state, especially in the face of population growth. A review of the academic literature showed the presence of problems in ensuring a high level of food security in China: the rigidity of demand for food, limited land resources, structural contradictions between supply and demand. This study proposes an approach to assessing the level of food security, based on the calculation of an integral index consisting of four units of indicators: the sub-index of provision of crop products, the sub-index of productivity, the sub-index of provision of livestock products, and the sub-index of food import dependence. The results show that, in general, the level of food security in China has increased over the period under review, but there are problems in self-sufficiency in crop and dairy products, as well as in an increase in food import dependence. A forecast of the dynamics of the integral index of the food security level and its sub-indices was constructed, which showed that a decrease in the integral index might occur due to a decrease in self-sufficiency in livestock products and import dependence, while the availability of crop products and yields will increase. The study showed that the measures taken by the Chinese government led to some positive changes, but it is necessary to take a comprehensive approach to this problem, to solve which it is necessary to use the potential of all sectors of the food industry. © 2021, Eesti Pollumajandusulikool. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This opinion piece looks at the substantial role of informal traders in ensuring food security, and other economic and social goods in South Africa and how they have been impacted by Covid-19 and responses to it. The state responses have reflected a continued undervaluing and undermining of this sector to the detriment of the traders themselves, their suppliers, and their customers. There is a need for a new valuing of the sector that would recognise and build on its mode of ordering and key contributions to society. This needs to include: shifting the narrative about the actors involved and challenging the concept of "informal"; planning and regulating to ensure more space for owner-operated small-scale food retailers; and putting in place a social-safety net to support them in times of crisis.
ABSTRACT
As these lines were written, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was continuing to threaten countries around the globe. The worldwide consensus that physical distancing is an effective instrument for mitigating the spread of the virus has led policymakers to temporarily limit the freedom of movement of people between and within countries, cities, and even neighborhoods. These public health-related restrictions on human mobility yielded an unprecedented fragmentation of international and national food distribution systems. Focusing on food retailing - usually being modestly oligopolistic - we take a micro-economic perspective as we analyze the potential consequences this disruption has for the physical as well as for the economic access of households to food at the local level. As the mobility constraints implemented substantially reduced competition, we argue that food retailers might have been tempted to take advantage of the implied fragmentation of economic activity by exploiting their temporarily raised market power at the expense of consumers and farmers. We illustrate our point by providing empirical evidences of rising wholesale-retail as well as farm-retail price margins observed during the Covid-19 crisis. Subsequently, we review existing empirical approaches that can be used to quantify and decompose the micro-economic effects of crises on food demand and supply as well as the size and structure of the market, costs of trade, and economic welfare. The employment of such approaches facilitates policymakers' understanding of micro-economic effects of public health-induced mobility restrictions on economic activity.