The agricultural sector has an important contribution to the socio-economic dynamics worldwide, but it is also vulnerable to internal particularities and external conjunctures. The frameworks created by the Covid-19 pandemic had implications for several economic sectors and agriculture was no exception. This chapter intends to highlight insights from the literature about the interrelationships between the pandemic and the agricultural sector. Information was considered from the Web of Science (Core Collection) for 1614 documents on a search carried out on 04 January 2023 for the topics “Covid-19” and “agricultur*”. These data were analysed through bibliometric analysis, systematic review, and factor analysis. As insights, it is worth noting the attention dedicated by the scientific community to the interrelationships among the pandemic and agriculture; namely, for example, in countries such as the US, China, India, and England.
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The Covid-19 pandemic topic has been addressed by the scientific community and researchers from diverse fields of science, some with perspectives about new technologies and sustainability (Ayan et al., 2022), others about the environment (Casado-Aranda et al., 2021), the agri-food chains (Das & Roy, 2022), food security (Martinho et al., 2022), agricultural production (Okolie & Ogundeji, 2022), socioeconomic dimensions (Patil et al., 2021), geospatial platforms (Pérez-Cutillas et al., 2023), digital transition (Rejeb, Rejeb, Abdollahi, et al., 2022) and food supply (Rejeb, Rejeb, Appolloni, et al., 2022). The bibliometric analysis was an approach considered in these researches.
The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic have been enormous in several sustainability dimensions (Joshi et al., 2022), including in social dynamics (Quigley et al., 2022). The agricultural sector was no an exception, with diverse disturbances in the dairy sector (Abhijit et al., 2021) and meat markets (Zielińska-Chmielewska et al., 2021), for example. The new contexts created by the pandemic brought additional concerns about the world population demand for food (Ahmad Rizal & Md Nordin, 2022) in quality (Éliás & Jámbor, 2021) and quantity (Rad et al., 2021). This is particularly worrying in countries with historical problems of poverty (Apaliya et al., 2022) and other difficulties (Rukasha et al., 2021). The new technologies and developments bring relevant contributions to the assessments of these recent challenges (Bahrami et al., 2022). Including to better respond to the difficulties created (Botene et al., 2021), detection (Patel et al., 2022) and carrying out predictions (Keshavamurthy et al., 2022), but promote other risks (Consavage Stanley et al., 2022). In fact, the events created by the pandemic are additional frameworks to those already existing and promoted by climate change, for instance (Belsey-Priebe et al., 2021). Nonetheless, the pandemic opened new opportunities and promoted new knowledge (Chandorkar et al., 2021).
The emergence of novel diseases is a health risk (White & Razgour, 2020), they are a consequence of increased human-animal interactions (Debnath et al., 2021) and require special attention from international organisations, governments and the scientific community (Dhama et al., 2021). The scientific community has an important role to produce knowledge, namely in the health domains (Heaney et al., 2021) and resource preservation (Hernández Castaño, 2021).
This literature review shows that has been brought relevant contributions by the scientific community about the several interrelationships between the Covid-19 pandemic and agriculture topics, considering bibliometric analysis and systematic reviews, but highlights also that there is a field to be explored. From this perspective, this research aims to bring more insights into these relationships through a systematic review based on bibliometric analysis (Martinho, 2022). For that, 1614 documents were considered from the Web of Science Core Collection (2023) in a search carried out on 4 January 2023 for the topics “Covid-19” and “agricultur*”. For the bibliometric analysis, the procedures proposed by the software VOSviewer (van Eck & Waltman, 2010, 2022; VOSviewer, 2023) were followed. The Scopus (2023) database was also consulted. To better explore the different interrelations, a factor analysis (Kim & Mueller, 1978a, 1978b; Vincent, 1971; Torres-Reyna, n.d.) was carried out following Stata (StataCorp, 2017a, 2017b; Stata, 2023) procedures.