The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era for businesses globally. This study examined how agricultural firms navigated the COVID-19 induced supply chains disruptions in Ebonyi, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling technique was employed in selecting 450 agricultural firms across the state from where data were elicited with structured questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR). Findings showed that the pandemic severely disrupted supply-chain activities, leading to outrageous price inflations, transportation-logistics disruptions, labour shortages, supply-chain bottlenecks, significant decrease in agricultural firms’ income and an increase in food insecurity. To mitigate these challenges, agricultural firms found alternative transportation and logistics solutions, diversified product offerings to meet changing demands and reduced labour requirements. The SUR estimates showed that production size, firm location, previous hazard experience hazard, product diversity, capital, social net benefits and operation risk influenced the firms’ post pandemic survival. The pandemic led to business’ shut down, severe movement restrictions with far-reaching devastating and lingering effects on the supply chain, economy and livelihood structure of the agricultural firms and populace at large. Firms must manage risks, maintain multi-layered diversification while government must provide robust social safety nets to enhance agricultural firms’ resilience and survival prospects against systemic shocks.
COVID-19; survival; livelihood; supply-chain; food security; production