**1. Introduction**

#### *1.1. The Pandemic Background*

On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) triggered their highest alert by announcing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as a public-health emergency of international concern. On 11 March 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. As the director-general of WHO explained: "*CO stands for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for the year the outbreak was first identified*". COVID-19 is the infectious disease resulting from the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1]. The virus can be transmitted during close contact between people via small respiratory droplets produced when an infected individual speaks, sneezes, or coughs. Furthermore, these droplets can contaminate surfaces. Common symptoms include dry cough and fever or mild symptoms such as nasal congestion, sore throat, loss of smell or taste as well as toes and fingers discoloration [1]. The virus can be asymptomatic, making COVID-19 control extremely challenging, as it can be passed on by individuals who might not notice that they have been infected. At the global level, governments have taken precaution measures to "flatten the curve", such as quarantine, lockdown, the isolation of infected individuals, travel restrictions, border shutdowns and social distancing [2,3]. However, these actions proved to have a detrimental e ffect on the economy leading to the economic recession and crisis [4].

COVID-19 has severely tested the resilience of supply chains. The e ffects of COVID-19 on agriculture, as in any sector, have not been manifested in full, while currently a second wave of the virus is impacting many countries. Key impacts on the food system up to now include the general population panic shopping and warehousing of durable food, including pasta, flour, beans and rice [5]. This led to empty shelves at supermarkets. Afraid of running out of domestic supplies, some countries were cautious and decided to close their borders. For example, Russia, Kazakhstan and Serbia temporarily banned exports of key staple foods [6,7]. In the same vein, European Union (EU) countries, such as France, suggested closing the borders of Europe until October 2020 [8]. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), from the beginning of May (2020), the international prices of the major staple commodities, such as wheat and maize have dropped. Conversely, rice is the only staple product whose price has risen. This is attributed to export restrictions of Vietnam, which is a key supplier, until 1 May 2020 [9]. On the other hand, grea<sup>t</sup> disturbance of supply chains as a consequence of population "lockdowns" has provoked a global decline in demand across the food service sector, such as restaurants, open markets, catering and hotels [10]. E ffective closure of food service segments has impacted all businesses across the supply chain including farms which provide the primary produce. To make matters worse, transport restrictions have hindered farmers' and fishers' ability to access markets, hence, limiting their productive capacities [9]. Disturbances downstream from farms can also cause accumulative surpluses, putting extra pressure on storage facilities, especially for highly perishable commodities.

#### *1.2. Pandemic E*ff*ects on Agriculutral Sector*

COVID-19 has impacted the agricultural workforce, especially the pool of seasonal agricultural workers. These are often migrant workers, typically employed in the crop harvesting, who use highly dexterous and physical skills [11,12]. Lockdowns and restrictions in the mobility of workers across borders contributed to labor shortages, mainly in countries that rely on seasonal workers. However, the ability of an agricultural system to exploit workers that can travel between workplaces constitutes a fundamental condition for its sustainability [13]. Unfortunately, emergency travel bans considerably decreased the available workforce. Moreover, no certainty exists that seasonal workers would like to work in countries that have been infected by COVID-19. Additionally, it was noted that many native workers fell ill or took care of sick members of the family or children, due to the closing of schools, further impacting the availability of seasonal personnel [14]. These consequences have particularly affected vegetable and fruit producers as well as garden nurseries and horticulture [15]. However, for many crops, the harvesting season is fixed and a deficiency of labor can result in production shortages in the food market and higher prices, making markets even more unforeseeable [16].

Owing to disruptions in logistics and transport services, COVID-19 lockdowns also impacted the provision of key intermediate products for farmers, such as pesticides, fertilizers and seeds. Additional supply chain checks and procedures resulted in delays to the transit of these products. Shortages or high prices in personal protection equipment from COVID-19 infection, such as hand sanitizers and face masks, caused additional delays and problems [5]. A representative example was China, where pesticide production declined suddenly after production plants shut down. Delays to the transport of these intermediate products can disturb supply chains for extended periods from 2020 and beyond [17].

In a nutshell, lockdown measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 caused a cascading e ffect on agricultural supply chains, especially of perishable products. In particular, a considerable decline in labor productivity, higher labor and transport costs, substantial income losses for farmers, food shortages and an increase in perishable products' prices, like vegetables and fruits for consumers, was observed during the first weeks [8]. As a means to document the existing situation in the agricultural

sector, predicting the potential e ffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggesting measures to mitigate them, several studies have been conducted. Some of them analyzed solely the impact of the virus on agricultural production regarding the first infected by COVID-19 countries, namely China [18,19] and later Italy [7,20–22]. In contrast, some studies dealt with the agricultural sector of countries, which were later infected by the viral pandemic, including countries from the rest of Asia (India [23,24] and Iran [25]), Oceania (Australia [26] and New Zealand [27]), Europe (rest of EU [5,28] and the United Kingdom (UK) [29]) as well as America (Argentine [30], Peru [31], Canada [32–36] and the US [14,37,38]).

#### *1.3. Policy Approaches to Mitigate the Negative Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Agriculture*

Undoubtedly, the agricultural sector is one of the most precarious and unforeseeable sectors. This fact has become even more intense because of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The major short-term concern was to keep farmworkers healthy. For this purpose, farmers, like the entire society, coped with unprecedented measures in order to contain the virus' spread. In a few words, precaution interventions, such as social distancing, travel restrictions, lockdown and self-isolation, proved to have a cascade e ffect on agriculture, introducing major limitations for farmworkers that have led to potentially devastating consequences. In the aftermath of these measures, the mobility of seasonal workers, especially that of migrant ones, was highly restricted, resulting in delays in harvesting and increased food losses, mostly a ffecting perishable goods. The governments of developed countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, which highly rely on this labor force, urgently adopted strategies to avoid disturbances owing to the imminent labor shortage. Overall, these strategies seem to be altered from one day to another, mirroring the problem's depth.

In the EU, for example, the policies for mitigating the seasonal workers shortage amid the harvesting period can be briefly analyzed into four axes according to the study of Mitaritonna and Ragot [8]:


The aforementioned strategies can help in the emergency situation characterized by a shortage of workers. It is very hard to single out which policy is the most e ffective, that is to say which combines the overcoming labor shortage with the lower costs.

Another important aspect is that health should be guaranteed throughout the food chain. To achieve this goal, measures like establishing biosecurity arrangements, enacting stricter employee health policies, using cashless transactions and gathering and communicating scientific evidence as soon as possible could help [39]. Limiting the COVID-19 spread in workplaces is another major concern. The example of the virus clusters in the meatpacking industry in California [14] reveals that COVID-19 may spread rapidly, thus reducing the availability of workers and leading to possible local lockdowns. More recently, workers from a meat processing industry in Greece [40] contracted COVID-19, with health officials deciding self-isolation for them in their home and closing the company. One solution to eradicate such problems would be working in shifts in order to avoid crowding with fewer people involved in the process by keeping safe distances and using personal protection like face masks, gloves and antiseptics.

#### *1.4. Aim of the Study*

In total, significant progress has been made in identifying the main problems caused by the first emergency measures to prevent the COVID-19 spread and the subsequent chain reaction in the food stocks, demand and prices. However, it is of major importance to assess the potential consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on agricultural-related occupations. To our knowledge, no study exists in the relative literature on this topic. Towards this direction, the aim of the present investigation is to examine the above consequences and sugges<sup>t</sup> ways to ensure the smooth operation of the agricultural sector in case of a second wave of COVID-19. To this end, since two clear sources of infection occur pertaining to the virus' transmission, namely the close proximity of workers and contaminated surfaces, the individual tasks (based on US Standard Occupational Classification system—SOC) are assessed with respect to these sources. There is an imperative necessity to manage potential COVID-19 resurgence, to protect workers and their jobs, as well as assure food supply and security.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**

In the absence of a methodology for such an analysis, a new methodology was developed. To meet this objective, each agricultural occupation was analyzed and characterized based on the individual tasks comprising this occupation and the corresponding potential risks.

For the analysis of the occupations, the employment and salaries data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) were implemented. For the standardization of occupations, the US 2018 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system was employed and more specifically, the eight-digit scheme of the Occupational Information Network (O\*NET) classification system [41]. Overall, 17 occupations related to agriculture were considered for the current investigation. It should be stressed that the jobs involving aquaculture and logging activities were excluded from the present analysis. The investigated occupations are summarized in Table 1 along with their eight-digit code and the number of tasks they encompass.

In order to assess the effect of the pandemic on the total agricultural workforce and on the total budget allocated to the agricultural occupations' salaries, the distribution of each occupation in the above metrics has to be considered. By processing the data provided by the US Department of Labor statistics (data refer to May 2017), Figure 1a,b presents the annual budget and the workforce distribution among the selected occupations.


**Table 1.** The O\*NET categorization of agricultural occupations and the corresponding codes along with the number of tasks they involve according to [41].

With the intention of assessing the risk level of the tasks comprising each occupation, each task was classified with respect to the contamination risk. Four levels of risk were identified, namely: minimal, low, moderate and high, by considering the most prevalent virus transmission mechanisms, namely the proximity of workers and the possibility of touching contaminated surfaces. In brief, a task has:


Six assessors, namely the authors of this study, independently assessed the level of risk of each task taking into account their own knowledge and the elaborated knowledge of an interviewed group of agricultural professionals including farm managers, first-line supervisors of crop and animal production, and various agricultural workers on horticulture, nursery, and livestock production. A consensus telemeeting of the assessors was held for the purpose of resolving any disagreement and arriving at the final result. The assessors have proved expertise in various fields of agricultural production including occupational health and safety, automation, operations management, agricultural technologies assessment, and agricultural ergonomics.

As can be seen in Figure 2, for the characterization of each task, the following methodology was implemented. Each individual task of an occupation is uniquely characterized by one of the four

defined risk levels. To this end, given the four risk levels, (minimal (*j* = 1), low (*j* = 2), moderate (*j* = 3), or high risk level (*j* = 4)), for each one of the *n* defined tasks composing an occupation, the grade "1" was assign for the risk level to which the particular task was classified, while the grade "0" was assigned for the other three levels. For example, if the first task (*i* = 1) of an hypothetical occupation was characterized as "moderate", then *X*1,3 = 1 and *X*1,1 = *X*1,2 = *X*1,4 = 0. After assigning grades to all the tasks of an occupation according to the same procedure, the average grade was calculated providing the percentage of tasks classified at each risk level (*wj* = 1*n ni*=<sup>1</sup> *Xi*,*j*·100%, *j* ∈ [1, 2, 3, 4], noting that <sup>4</sup>*j*=<sup>1</sup> *wj* = 100%). Finally, by considering the above approach, each occupation receives a weighted risk level characterization of the tasks it involves, which can be illustrated in the form of a single bar chart, as can be seen in the right side of Figure 2.

 **Figure 1.** (**a**) Annual budget and (**b**) workforce distribution of agricultural occupations; the correspondence between the codes and occupations is shown in Table 1.

**Figure 2.** Methodology for the characterization of the risk level of the tasks comprising an occupation.
