Agricultural input retailers play a key role in Myanmar’s agri-food system by supplying farmers with fertilizer, seed, pesticides, and other inputs necessary for successful harvests. Because farm-level input use is an important driver of yields for all major food crops, economic shocks to the input retail sector have major implications for rural household welfare as well as for food security. To understand the effects of political instability, COVID-19, and other shocks on Myanmar’s agricultural input sector, a phone survey of 252 input retailers throughout the country was conducted in July 2022.
You can view the full research note in English here.
Business disruptions and their impacts
To understand the effects of economic disruptions on input retailers, researchers from the Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA) asked whether businesses had been affected by a list of potential shocks. Figure 2 shows the shocks experienced by input retailers in July 2022. Ninety percent of the sample was impacted by increased transportation costs, 60 percent by higher fuel prices, and nearly 50 percent was affected by curfews or transportation restrictions. Curfews and transportation restrictions are largely enforced at the state/region and townships levels, though these restrictions are less common. Still, nearly half of those retailers reporting restrictions said they are enforced at the village level. Road blockades and special permissions are the most common restrictions.
To provide more information on the magnitudes of disruptions, researchers asked retailers which challenge was the most significant disruption. In addition to being the most prevalent challenge, transportation costs and disruptions also had the largest business impacts: 68 percent of input retailers cited transportation as the most significant disruption in July 2022 (Figure 3). This represents a pronounced shift in the most impactful disruption facing the agri-input sector compared to the previous survey rounds. In the 2021 surveys, issues in the banking sector were the dominant disruption for input retailers, reported by 41-75 percent of respondents in the March, June, and September rounds. While, in July 2022, the banking sector was the main challenge for only 7 percent of respondents.
This blog post highlights one of the many recent surveys and research notes that MAPSA has conducted to assess the emerging constraints that key agricultural actors face and to mitigate the possible impacts of COVID-19 and recent disruptions on rural livelihoods and food security. Additional blog posts are available highlighting MAPSA’s research on the impact of disruptions on key actors in Myanmar’s agri-food system. Surveys are ongoing, and findings and recommendations will be periodically updated.
