Livestock production is important for the sustainability of certain regions of Portugal and the food security of the Portuguese population. Nonetheless, the associated markets have specific particularities worldwide, which justify particular policies and supports for these sectors designed, for example, by the European Union institutions. This chapter proposes to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict on Portuguese livestock producer prices. Data were considered from SIMA (Sistema de Informação de Mercados Agrícolas) for the weeks of 2017-2022, namely for cow and country chicken carcasses. There are some signs of impacts on the producer prices from the most recent events, namely the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
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The livestock markets are vulnerable to animal diseases (Barigye et al., 2022), the respective particularities and conditions of transmission (Fielding et al., 2021). Sometimes these diseases are transmitted through trade (Ezanno et al., 2022), contributing to their spread (Knight et al., 2022), with consequences in the farms’ productivity (ElAshmawy et al., 2023) and prices (Jean-Pierre et al., 2022). The respective treatments with antimicrobials (Adebowale et al., 2022) also affect in some circumstances these markets.
The dimensions related to animal disease and sanitary risks were also the focus of studies for the following countries: Japan (Fujimoto et al., 2020); Nigeria (Limon et al., 2020; Funsho-Sanni et al., 2022); United Arab Emirates (Hassan et al., 2020); Kenya (Murungi et al., 2021); United States (Nichols et al., 2022); Uganda (Okello et al., 2021); Rwanda (Shyaka et al., 2022).
The livestock markets are important for farmers, particularly in developing countries (Onduso et al., 2020). In these markets, the availability of information is fundamental (Afolabi & Tiamiyu, 2021), namely for animal health investigation (George et al., 2021). The same importance must be given to the institutional services (Mohamed Sala et al., 2020) and the conditions to sell and cull the animals (Soliman, 2021).
Animal welfare is another concern (Creutzinger et al., 2021) worldwide (Windsor, 2021), specifically during transport (Bravo et al., 2020) and in livestock markets (Sánchez-Hidalgo et al., 2020). The risks in the production processes (Çevrimli et al., 2022) have deserved also special attention. In some cases, animals are not in condition to be transported, because of health problems (Stojkov et al., 2020a). These and others factors compromise the conditions of the animals that arrive at livestock markets (Stojkov et al., 2020b). Some of these dimensions influence the buyers’ decisions and the respective prices practised (Rosen et al., 2020).
Taking into account the perspectives presented before, this study aims to analyse the Portuguese livestock production markets considering data from the national agricultural market information (SIMA, 2023) from 2017 to 2022 and using the Stata (StataCorp, 2017a, 2017b; Stata, 2023) software to obtain some findings. For the literature review, the Scopus (2023) database was analysed.
In the following section, the options made to choose the Portuguese livestock markets were based on a previous analysis of the markets and the more relevant changes in the respective prices practised. For the normalised values, the following formula was considered: (xi-xminimum)/(xmaximum-xminimum).