In this paper we descriptively investigate the Covid‐19 pandemic's early impact on the fruit and vegetable supply chain in Senegal, using trade statistics and survey data collected through online questionnaires and telephone interviews with smallholder farmers, agro‐industrial companies, agricultural workers, traders, importers, and consumers. Our results point to major differences in how Covid‐19 and containment measures disrupt supply chains between the modern export‐oriented supply chain that is centered around a few large vertically integrated agro‐industrial companies, and the more traditional domestic‐oriented supply chain with a large number of smallholder farmers and informal traders—with the former being more resilient to the Covid‐19 shock. We show that both the modern and the traditional supply chain innovate to cope with the Covid‐19 containment measures. While our study is subject to some limitations, our findings bring nuance in the debate on the resilience of the food system to the pandemic, and have important policy and research implications toward international trade, social safety measures, and food and nutrition security.

The rapid expansion of agrifood exports from low‐ and middle‐income countries and the contribution of global value chains to rural development are well‐documented in the literature. Also, studies on modernization of domestic food value chains in these countries are emerging. Yet, the linkages between global and local value chains are rarely studied. On the one hand, the development and expansion of global value chains may create competition with local value chains for land, labor, water, soil nutrients, and other resources. On the other hand, positive spillover effects, such as investment, technical or institutional spillovers, may occur and spur the development of local value chains. In this article, we put forward a conceptual discussion on the type of linkages between global and local value chains, and how these depend on crop and value chain characteristics. We review the empirical evidence on these linkages. Our focus is on Africa, where agrifood exports and global value chains evolved rapidly and where challenges remain to upgrade and increase efficiency in local food value chains.

To attenuate the adverse effects of high population growth in low-income countries and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, knowledge on rural fertility preferences and the existence of a quantity-quality trade-off between the number of children and child-raising quality is key. To tackle this, we implement a choice experiment in Senegal and Uganda. We include three quality and one quantity aspect of child-raising, and three socio-economic drivers of fertility, resulting in a comprehensive assessment. We show that rural households prefer to have many children, but women and non-poor respondents demonstrate a lower preference for many children than men and poor respondents. We find that the quantity-quality trade-off is a two-sided story. On the one hand, for most of the quality attributes, we confirm the existence of a trade-off. On the other hand, quantity and quality are complementary when all children in the household can attain a lower secondary school diploma. Our results imply that broadening the currently narrow focus on contraceptive uptake in family planning programs, and more specific targeting of such programs to people with low fertility preferences, could improve their effectiveness. JEL codes J10, J13, J19

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