The Impacts of Covid-19 on the Global Supply Channels (Logistic and Transport)

The Impacts of Covid-19 on the Global Supply Channels (Logistic and Transport)
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The Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic on the Global Supply Channels (Logistic and Transport)
Background Information
The supply channel is well-defined as the assortment of internal business establishments and peripheral channel associates forming a partnership to meritoriously perform the purposes necessary to move goods and services and marketing data as they pass through marketing, manufacturing, and sales systems. Business administrations worldwide use air transport, water, and road and rail transport systems as supply channels to move goods and services globally. Critically, the Covid-19 epidemic has impacted the supply channels of many nations across the world. The Covid-19 pandemic, formerly known as 2019-nCov, was instigated by SaRS-CoV-2. Notably, the infection in question was triggered in December 2019 in Wuhan city in China. The outbreak was later followed by a quick spread to Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America. The WHO confirmed it as an epidemic on 11th March the year 2020. Currently, every country records new cases of Covid-19 infection. The WHO continues to urge governments to slow the spread by imposing containment and suppression measures ranging from strict policies on travel, social gathering, and commercial activities beyond borders aimed at flattening the Covid-19 flattening curve. The world has managed to reduce the spread and adverse health effects of Covid-19, leading to less strict measures to protect immunologically compromised persons, treat Covid-19 victims, and attain herd immunity. Achieving herd immunity means having a community of recovered individuals from the disease and therefore immune to contain the spread of the pandemic.
Despite the positive impacts of the active safety measures and the innovation of evidence-based vaccines, the infection affects the global supply channels of different countries. Global supply chains face unprecedented challenges in logistics food and drink supply, among others. Since the emergence of the infection in early 2020, global supply has slowed down drastically for numerous reasons but not limited to disrupt shipping lanes, labor, shortages of production materials, and fluctuating demands of finished products. Countries with a stable economy, such as China, the USA, and Europe, experience interruptions in production which disrupt the global chain supply. Global industries depending on the production materials from China and USA, and Africa have experienced reductions in production. With close to the analysis above, the paper critically analyses the remarkable influences of the epidemic on global supply channel.
Logistic Industries under Covid-19 Pandemic
Logistic industries connect local, regional and international forms to markets by providing transportation services incorporating warehousing, clearing, forwarding "freight forwarding," and account management (Hill & Hernández-Requejo, 2006). These services are crucial for global production, which is multifaceted and multilocational—the iPhone usages constituents from at least 200 dealers in 43 nations (Hedwall, 2020). The covid-19 pandemic continues to affect the current society leading to the adoption of lockdowns and closing borders which restrict the movement of merchandise and services. Supplementary rules such as social isolation at storerooms developed to promote the well-being of workforces have underwritten to the bottleneck of freights. Most of the tracks in the European Union are unable to cross borders due to the closing of borders witnessed in Poland and Germany. The lockdown policy initiated in India has instigated a shortage of truck drivers, leading to the large pile of containers in Chennai and Kattupalli (Pylneva et al., 2021). Handling of containers in China dropped by about 10% in the initial three months of 2020.
Road Transport
The road transport sector is crucial to economic and social development. On the other hand, it guarantees the mobility or movement of merchandise such as food and medical equipment and raw materials used by industries and consumers (Osinska & Zalewski, 2020). Road transport makes an exceptional contribution to the economic development, employment creation, and supply of essential products. Many countries globally instituted strict policies on internal transit and even closed borders for cargo transport activities. 
These policies diminished local, regional, and international trade and disrupted the supply chain that affected the landlocked developing nations (Świtała & Łukasiewicz, 2021). Road transport has been affected the most. For example, China has introduced many restriction policies to minimize transportation of people and goods. Currently, the Chinese government allows a specified amount of products to pass their internal and external borders, which has reduced the number of goods transported related to the pre-Covid-19 period (Liu et al., 2020). The issue has led to little supply of fresh vegetables and fruits from the producers to consumers. On the other hand, producers become problematic because their products pile and get rotten. After all, the country minimizes the number of products to be transported. 
African countries such as Kenya force truck drivers to obtain Covid-19 health certificates stating their health status, leading to delay of goods in borderlines. The truck drivers were the most affected group in the road transport sector though they helped retailers and wholesalers by ensuring they were stocked with enough products during the pandemic (Huho, 2020). Government policies such as travel bans, border closures, export restrictions, and social distancing of individuals and lockdown negatively impacted the working conditions of truck drivers. Besides, most truck drivers are self-employed. Hence, they are unprotected by the labor and employment protection policies on health insurance and disability compensation. The issue brought a lot of fear among truck drivers, making them stop engaging in freight activities which led to much suffering among households during the pandemic. It also led to the deterioration of profitability and liquidity of small and medium-sized organizations due to the lack of enough raw materials needed for production. The demand for public transport in Saudi Arabian countries decreased to 30%. The issues impacted about 75% of the individual's mobility.
On the other hand, about 679 USA billion dollars' worth of goods has been lost due to Covid-19. The decline is sharper in Europe, with an estimated loss of 125 USA billion dollars. Saudi Arabia and the USA have lost goods worth 1 billion and 63 billion USA dollars, respectively, while China lost 131 billion USA dollars. The restrictions placed on road transport affected the global trade flows at unprecedented scale and speed. For example, world trade flows had reduced to 5% within the first three months of 2020, with a deeper contraction of 27% within the first six months of 2020 (Świtała & Łukasiewicz, 2021). A further drop of about 20% was expected in the coming years. Due to reduced road transport activities, registered trading activities were reduced by 40% in African nations. Conversely, the trade activities in Latin America and South America declined. 
East Asia and the pacific trade reduced by about 4% in 2019 and & 7% in 2020. China seemed to have performed better on export. However, the 2020 data expressed that its import and export fell by about 8%. Similarly, apparel and Textile reduced by 12%, while the office machinery and automotive sector dropped by 8% (Świtała & Łukasiewicz, 2021). In contrast, the value of international trade in the agricultural foods sector reduced by 2% due to the lack of a proper transportation system.
Furthermore, trade-in transport tools and demand for fuel reduced from 50% to 30% in April 2020. The sharp contraction in automotive and energy trade recorded -50% and -40% respectively. The reductions and contraction noted in the global flow of products resulted from reduced road transport activities, limiting producers, retailers, and consumers to receive enough products. 
Air transport
Air transport is one of the supply channels of transporting human services and goods to a different market. The global spread of the Covid-19 disease enormously impacted the aviation and air travel business across all nations. (Li, 2021) In 2020, the number of potential consumers of aviation services dropped by 60% compared to 2019. The unprecedented drop resulted in a loss of 371 billion US dollars by airline companies worldwide. The contraction of airline industries also experienced severe socioeconomic problems. For example, many individuals lost their jobs in travel industries leading to bankruptcy and restructuring of numerous airline organizations. Consequently, it led to a 69% drop in passenger revenue. 
On the other hand, the calamities witnessed in the world airline industry have increased air cargo transportation activities (Li, 2021). For example, numerous airline companies have invested their resources to enable them to switch from cargo transportation to freighting leading to 27& growth and modification of business model and priorities of airline industries during the Covid-19 peak period. The tight financial conditions and change of revenue sources due to the Covid-19 pandemic have compelled logistic firms to adjust by increasing the cost of products in many ways (Cui et al., 2021). For example, unlike formerly, freight companies used smaller airports frequently instead of significant hubs to stay close to final producers of different products and potential clients.
 On the other hand, many airline companies have resorted to offering sightseeing flights enabling clients to enjoy the flight experience. It attracts more clients to board flights during the pandemic (Sokadjo & Atchadé, 2020). The change noted in the consumer behavior after the Covid-19 virus, travel limitations, and the ensuing economic disaster led to a histrionic drop in carrier services. Conferring to IATA, passenger air carriage dropped to 90% while freight air transport dropped to 30% in 2020. 
On the other hand, Bouali et al. (2020) argue that Covid-19 distressed worldwide passenger transport and air consignment leading to devastating fatalities and insolvency for most airline companies acros...