**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and negatively impacted national economies around the world [1]. This has revealed vulnerabilities in global food supply chains that are critical for human survival. Gao et al. [2] (p. 832) define supply chain disruptions as events such as fire or machine breakdown in a production facility, an unexpected surge in demand or a reduction in supply, natural disasters, or customs delays in a node of the supply chain. Food industry players in developing countries have been encouraged to explore global markets for their produce [3] to grow and further develop their businesses [4]. Such a strategy will enable them to take advantage of the potential benefits of participating in the global economy [5,6]. However, global food supply chains have been largely affected and brought under scrutiny during this pandemic as countries respond to measures and regulations to combat the pandemic [7–9]. Indeed, food production, transporting and shipping have been disrupted to different degrees and in different instances [10,11]. These have caused unprecedented disruptions at various operational levels in these supply chains and participating organisations. [8,11–13] The attendant disruptions in the demand patterns from international to the local have called into question the paradigm anchored in overreliance on global supply chains in times such as the current pandemic as against alternative parallel development of "local food" channels for these global export food chains [14,15], especially those with linkages to Sub-Saharan African food supply chains [16].

**Citation:** Yawson, D.E.; Yamoah, F.A. Review of Strategic Agility: A Holistic Framework for Fresh Produce Supply Chain Disruptions. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 14977. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su142214977

Academic Editor: Riccardo Testa

Received: 20 October 2022 Accepted: 10 November 2022 Published: 12 November 2022

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<sup>1</sup> GIMPA Business School, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Achimota, Accra P.O. Box AH 50, Ghana

Ghana, a Sub-Saharan African lower middle-income country has been supported by global organisations to develop alternate exports, which are mainly for food products and termed as Non-Traditional Exports (NTEs) [17,18]. In Ghana, one of the main NTEs is the export of fresh pineapples. Typically, food export supply chains have been developed based on the paradigm of participating in world trade [3,6,19] with the hope of building competitiveness [20]. However, these food export supply chains, especially the fresh pineapple export chains have on many occasions suffered major incidents/shocks of changes in market regulation and in demand patterns that have bankrupted a significant number of chain actors (companies) seeking to export in the recent past [21–23]. Admittedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is by all measures a major global challenge which has severely impacted the export food chains. These shocks especially by this pandemic are more devastating as almost all food exporters in developing countries such as Ghana, do not have alternative competitive "local food" product outlets to rely on in times of such global pandemics [5,16]. Therefore, where almost all national country borders were closed to human and goods traffic for food exporters at some point during the pandemic as part of measures to manage the pandemic, this did create critical challenges. These issues cascade into other issues of safeguarding small and medium businesses to protecting local economies. However, these incidences and shocks encountered by actors in the fresh fruits export supply chain would have to serve as learning opportunities to build strategic agility in these chains [4,24–26]. This is to improve competitiveness in these chains and enable them to withstand shocks in their connection to international food supply chains [4,10,24,26,27].

In this review paper, therefore, we use a developing country fresh fruit export supply chain (i.e., Ghanaian Pineapple Exports Supply Chain) as a case study to illustrate the pre-COVID and during COVID scenarios of developing country fresh fruit supply chains, to explore the current supply chain paradigm, the alternatives to building agility and competitiveness, and the paradigm of creating alternative "local food" channels in fresh fruit supply chains. The review is grounded in the domain of alternative methodological framework used for the evaluation and monitoring of strategic agility in horticultural export supply chains and their context of development [5] to make the following contributions: First, present the competitiveness and agile efficacy imperatives of the Ghanaian Fresh Pineapple Exports supply chain before the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondly, we present the competitive advantage and strategic agile efficacy imperatives of the Ghanaian Fresh Pineapple Exports supply chain during COVID-19 pandemic.

It is our position that the need has arisen for a second look at paradigms for the development of fresh fruit supply chains, especially in Sub-Saharan African countries to build competitiveness through strategic agility to ensure corresponding resilience. Based on a critical review focused on the applicability of Supply chain agility as a methodological framework in a stable (pre-COVID-19) versus turbulent (COVID-19) business environment, we argue that strategic agility framework offers an adaptable tool as a panacea to fresh produce supply chain challenges in both stable and turbulent fresh produce export supply chain environments.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the theoretical foundations of agility in supply chains; horticulture exports supply chain and the COVID-19 pandemic; horticulture exports supply chain monitoring and evaluation and the theoretical lens for supply chain agility. Then, the scenarios for comparing the applicability of strategic agility under stable and turbulent COVID-19 business environments are presented. Followed by the background of the Ghanaian fresh pineapple supply chain to Europe; supply chain agility as a methodological framework in a stable (pre-COVID-19) and turbulent (COVID-19) business environments; propositions; and concluding remarks and contributions. The paper concludes with the implications for research.
