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Via national lockdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the production and distribution of foodstuffs worldwide, including rice (Oryza sativa L.) production, affecting the prices in India's agroecosystems and markets. The present study was performed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 national lockdown on rice prices in India, and to develop statistical machine learning models to forecast price changes under similar crisis scenarios. To estimate the rice prices under COVID-19, the general time series models, such as the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, the artificial neural network (ANN) model, and the extreme learning machine (ELM) model, were applied. The results obtained using the ARIMA intervention model revealed that during the COVID-19 lockdown in India, rice prices increased by INR 0.92/kg. In addition, the ELM intervention model was faster, with less computation time, and provided better results vs other models because it detects the nonlinear pattern in time series data, along with the intervention variable, which was considered an exogenous variable. The use of forecasting models can be a useful tool in supporting decision makers, especially under unpredictable crises. The study results are of great importance for the national agri-food sector, as they can bolster authorities and policymakers in planning and designing more sustainable interventions in the food market during (inter)national crisis situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust forecast of rice yields is of great importance for medium-to-long-term planning and decision-making in cereal production, from regional to national level. Incorporation of spatially correlated adjacent effects in forecasting models in general, results in accurate forecast. The Space Time Autoregressive Moving Average (STARMA) is the most popular class of model in linear spatiotemporal time series modelling. However, STARMA cannot process nonlinear spatiotemporal relationships in datasets. Alternately, Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) is a most popular machine learning algorithm to model the nonlinear pattern in data. To overcome these limitations, two-stage STARMA approach was developed to predict rice yield in some of the most intensive national rice agroecosystems in India. The Mean Absolute Percentage Errors value of proposed STARMA-II approach is lower compared to Autoregressive Moving Average (ARIMA) and STARMA model in all examined districts, while the Diebold-Mariano test confirmed that STARMA-II model is significantly different from classical approaches. The proposed STARMA-II approach is promising alternative to classical linear and nonlinear spatiotemporal time series models for estimating mixed linear and nonlinear patterns and can be advanced tool for mid-to-long-term sustainable planning and management of crop yields and patterns in agroecosystems, i.e., food supply and demand from local to regional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study's objective was to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tomato supply and prices in Gudimalkapur market in Hyderabad, India. The lockdown imposed by the government of India from 25 March 2020 to 30 June 2020 particularly affected the supply chain of perishable agricultural products, including tomatoes as one of the major vegetable crops in the study area. The classical time series models such as autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) intervention models and artificial intelligence (AI)-based time-series models namely support vector regression (SVR) intervention and artificial neural network (ANN) intervention models were used to predict tomato supplies and prices in the studied market. The modelling results show that the pandemic had a negative impact on supply and a positive impact on tomato prices. Moreover, the ANN intervention model outperformed the other models in both the training and test data sets. The superior performance of the ANN intervention model could be due to its ability to account for the nonlinear and complex nature of the data with exogenous intervention variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]