Effects of COVID-19 on China's rape industry and strategies

ABSTRACT

To effectively cope with the shock of COVID-19 and its subsequent impact, and to promote stable and healthy development of rape industry, this paper systematically analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on China's rape industry. It includes perspectives of farmer's life, rape production and rapeseed processing enterprises, based on micro survey data provided by the National Rapeseed Industrial Technology System. The results showed that in terms of farmers' life, only 0.98% of the respondents were in a shortage of edible vegetable oil and 76.06% of them reflected no impact or a little impact on total household income. However, rural tourism decreased by 10.24 percentage points, and honey collecting behavior of bee farmers decreased by 4.6 points. On field production, 85.47% of the respondents reported "no change" and "small reduction" in field management workload, 90.38% reflected "no impact" and "a littlel impact" on rapeseed production employment, 79.06% considered "overall stability" in the price of agricultural materials, and 98.48% believed that it had a little impact on final output. However, the pest reporting rate increased by 4.99 points than last season. On rapeseed processing, it varied from region to region on the rapeseed processing enterprises' resumption rate, starting-up rate, specific difficulties faced by enterprises and government policies. Based on these results, future strategies should be taken to ensure improving development of rape industry. The strategies should include perfect construction of China's oil reserve system, more attention to diversification of imports, more innovation and technology promotion, optimization on marketing system and construction of information platform, and a"package"subsidy plan for the industry.