The agricultural futures market plays an extremely important role in price discovery, hedging risks, integrating agricultural markets and promoting agricultural economic growth. China is the largest apple producer and consumer in the world. In 2017, Chinese apple futures were listed on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange (CZCE) as the first fruit futures contract globally. This paper aims to study the efficiency of the apple futures market by using the Wild Bootstrapping Variance Ratio model to estimate the price discovery function, the ARIMA-GARCH model to estimate the risk-hedging function, and the ARDL-ECM model to estimate the cointegration relationship of the futures and spot market. Experimental results firstly demonstrate that the apple futures market conforms to the weak-form efficiency, which indicates that it is efficient in price discovery. Secondly, the apple futures market is not of semi-strong efficiency because it generated abnormal profit margins amid China–US trade friction, climate disaster, and COVID-19; in terms of the degree of impact, the COVID-19 pandemic had the greatest impact, followed by the rainstorm disaster and trade friction. Thirdly, the results of this study indicate that the cointegration relationships exist between the futures market and the spot markets of the main producing areas. This paper is not only conducive to sustainable development of the global fresh or fruit futures market, but also has potential and practical importance for China in developing the agricultural futures market, strengthening market risk management and promoting market circulation.

We use the ARIMA-GARCH model to estimate the shocks of COVID-19 on Chinese agricultural markets and utilize the ARDL-ECM model to estimate the integration relationships between Chinese and international agricultural markets which are based on the effective market hypothesis theory and daily trading data of US, UK, China and India. The main study findings showed that COVID-19 has a significant negative impact on agricultural product market, specifically, India suffered with the greatest negative impact, followed by the UK, the US and China. Further, this study results revealed that Chinese grain markets that are considered strategic places have not been separated from international markets, but there still exist segmentation phenomena among non-strategic agricultural markets.