The Sustainable Aquaculture Group have been working with WorldFish and other partners to document and understand the ways in which the covid-19 pandemic is affecting aquaculture producers and all stakeholders in both local and international seafood value chains.
Hamia Noronha
As part of this work, MSc student Hamia Noronha from India has been researching the impacts of covid-19 on aquaculture value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa. This was carried out in collaboration with WorldFish and found that producers had been affected both through disruptions to supplies and also to markets.
Dave Little collaborated with WorldFish and other partners in the writing of an initial paper on covid-19 impacts which is currently available as a pre-print. The abstract for this is shown below.
WorldFish has been particularly active in documenting covid-19 impacts in different countries and how they affect different stakeholders, and also in the adaptive responses by governments, industry and communities.
Ongoing updates can be found on the WorldFish website
“The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns are creating health and economic crises that threaten food and nutrition security. The seafood sector provides important sources of employment and nutrition, especially in low-income countries, and is highly globalized, allowing shocks to propagate internationally. We use a resilience ‘action cycle’ framework to study the first five months of COVID-19-related disruptions, impacts, and responses to the seafood sector. Looking across high- and low-income countries, we find that some supply chains, market segments, companies, small-scale actors and civil society have shown initial signs of greater resilience than others. For example, frozen Ecuadorian shrimp and Chinese tilapia exports were diverted to alternative markets, while live-fresh supply chains were more impacted. COVID-19 has also highlighted the vulnerability of certain groups working in- or dependent on the seafood sector. We discuss early coping and adaptive responses, combined with lessons from past shocks, that could be considered when building resilience in the sector.”
