Impact of the COVID-19 on global trade of kiwifruit

Abstract

The global trade of kiwifruit started in New Zealand in the 1950s, and entered a stage of rapid development afterwards. In 2019, the trade volume of kiwifruit reached 3.46 billion U.S. dollars. The major exporters include New Zealand, Italy, Belgium and Chile, and meanwhile, China, Japan, Belgium and Germany are playing important roles in importing. At the beginning of the 2020, the COVID-19 broke out in many countries one after another. What drove the world economy down was not simply virus itself, but a series of regulations came after. The epidemic led governments to issue lockdown order, which resulted in a chain reaction and global trade shrinking, and the kiwifruit market had been hit without exception. Farmers who got used to JIT mode suffered the impact from both the upstream and downstream of the supply chain. So far, the existing literatures in relative area mainly focus on the macro market level, in which they quote official data and make speculations base on facts. In the meanwhile, there is merely no analysis of specific industries nor has the quantitative analysis of trade data been made. As a result, our study aimed to understand the fluctuation of the kiwifruit trade volume due to the COVID- 19 worldwide in an empirical way. A time sequence model was built based on the dataset collected from FAO, UN database and customs website of relevant countries to get the monthly predicted trade value in 2020. We selected several most representative import and export countries for analysis, and the results showed that although the total value of kiwifruit trading witnessed a slight drop, the fluctuation was enormously varied from month to month. The most significant import rise appeared in China in February and March, reaching 2425% and 1380%, respectively. In March, the import value in Japan soared by 446% and the export value in New Zealand raised by 167%. In terms of regions, China experienced the raging virus and ushered in the dawn at the end of February. At the beginning of the epidemic, unprecedented strict lockdown measures made it hard to get commodities from international market, which explained the declining of import in January. In February, China's imports and exports had basically recovered to normal, so the import of kiwifruit surged in the next two months. Japan is another fat part in importing kiwifruit, and a small outbreak scale as well as the lack of domestic stocks explained the rise of importing before May. New Zealand is the largest exporter of kiwifruit in the world. Although it was less affected by the epidemic, the decline of global demand at the beginning of 2020 and the short of available labor in the second quarter may be main stumbling blocks ahead their way to export. All in all, the data from January to August reflected that the greater impact had imposed on Asia and Oceania than that on Europe, except the export value in Belgium. When talking about some of the worst affected nations, U.S. A, India and Brazil are the only three countries whose number of infections have exceeded 5 million. After comparing available trade data in 2020 with previous figures separately, we found that conspicuous ups and downs had reflected in those countries. Especially in June in U.S.A and September in India, the growth rate of import reached 100% and 103%, respectively. The huge fluctuations are considered to have connection with disrupted global supply chain, hindered labor mobility, plunging global demand, the rise of trade protectionism as well as the time lag between the spread of the virus among countries. However, as those problems were prominent in North America and Europe attributed to the increasingly serious epidemic, the kiwifruit trade in those two markets may be severely affected in the future. China is one of the very first countries to emerge from the shadow of the COVID-19, which provides an opportunity for Chinese kiwifruit industry to develop the good fruit quality and seize the global market share. As the world's largest producer and importer of kiwifruit, China owned more than 1 2 thousand hectares kiwifruit orchards and yielded more than 2 million tones fruit in 2019. In the same year, China spent more than $450 million in importing kiwifruit, which made it the biggest kiwifruit buyer in international market. Although China's kiwifruit market has huge throughput, its domestic fruit needs to face problems like uneven product quality, low average profit margin and low unit output. In order to settle current problems, we came up with three suggestions: Firstly, strengthen the integration of industry and academia, and tap into regional dominant varieties;Secondly, increase government support in multiple ways in order to build a thorough export system;Finally, construct closer cooperation in worldwide and conform to international standards. All of them are intended to improve the industry of Chinese kiwifruit better and healthier by not only using the existing advantages but also exploring new ways. © 2021, Office of Journal of the Fruit Science. All right reserved.