The COVID-19 pandemic has caused considerable damage to various industries worldwide. Availability and supply of a wide range of raw materials, intermediate goods, and finished products have been seriously disrupted. Global supply chains (GSCs), which had shown a high level of robustness and resiliency against several disruptions in recent decades, are genuinely compromised. Using a critical reading and a causal analysis of facts and figures, this article aims to investigate the COVID-19 impacts on the effectiveness and responsiveness of GSCs and to propose a set of managerial insights to mitigate their risks and enhance their resilience in various industrial sectors. The study showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented disruptions to the mechanics of most GSCs such as pharmaceuticals, food, electronics, automotive industry, etc. Unlike previous major disruptions, COVID-19 has adversely affected GSCs throughout all their stages with major turbulences in manufacturing, processing, transport, and logistics, as well as significant shifts in demand. The analysis pinpointed that enhancing the supply chain resilience is the main key driver to reducing vulnerability in disruptive times. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that the post-COVID-19 GSCs will tend to be shorter through revamped strategies focusing more and more on relocations and back-shoring.

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The COVID-19 pandemic and locust swarm outbreaks pose a significant threat to global food systems, causing severe disruptions in both local and international food supplies from farm to fork. The main objective of this study is to understand and identify the disruptions during the crises and create a map of how resilience can be established to recover and sustain the food supply chain (FSC) functions as well as food security. The detrimental impacts of the compound crises on the FSC are explored and the effects of the affected areas are estimated under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. As a response to the disruption caused by the crisis in FSCs, reactive and proactive solutions are proposed to develop resilience at the food sector level. In the short term, the reactive solutions, consisting of smoothing the food demand, supply and delivery, and food production and processing, can be borrowed. In the long term, the proactive solutions can be conducted by developing multi-level short intertwined FSCs. Our comprehensive investigation of the resilience elements in diverse operations and potential strategies should contribute to the improvement of FSC resilience in the face of ongoing and growing threats.

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