Coronavirus is Coming for Our Food Supply Next, Are You Ready??
Without question, COVID-19 has proven to be a wicked viral threat that seems to prey on the weaknesses of those infected.
Likewise, the virus has exposed in sudden and dramatic fashion how many key aspects of society are broken — or in serious need of a retool.
Two months ago, as coronavirus made its way from Asia to Europe, we wrote about how global shipping was already being impacted by port closures, fluctuating shipping prices and documentation delays. In early March, we were among the first to call for the postponement of Natural Product Expo West in Anaheim, Calif., an incredibly hard decision that was the first largest cancellation of its kind, occurring about a week before SXSW postponed its annual tech and music soiree in Austin, Texas. In late March, we were asking “Where are the masks?” as U.S. healthcare workers on the frontlines of the battle against the pandemic went (and still are often going) without enough of the personal protective equipment (PPE) they need because of fraud and a lack of corporate citizenship on the part of mask-makers like 3M.
It’s now mid-April and COVID-19 is coming for your food. And it is happening every way possible.
There are shortages, as we’ve seen empty supermarket shelves and food banks facing record demand. There is waste because isolation measures have closed so many institutional suppliers’ customers and restaurants/caterers, and because of labor shortages and risks. Perhaps the most critical supply chain on the map has broken, and it’s only a matter of time before we start feeling this on a more regular basis in our communities:
What accounts for this massive logistical failure, now artificially creating shortages? In nonviral times, much of the food being produced on farms would be sent to schools and restaurants. But with those locations shut down almost categorically nationwide, there’s no infrastructure in place to simply redirect the food to grocery stores and food banks, especially with short-shelf-life items like vegetables, meat, and dairy. Those two tracks—commercial and consumer food supply chains—remain fiercely separated.
The issues are almost too numerous to mention and could warrant a daily update. Here are some of the latest:
-Labor shortages and panic buying are creating chaos for American farmers. It’s estimated there will be $1.32 billion in U.S. agricultural losses between March and April, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
From The Guardian: As US food banks handle record demand and grocery stores struggle to keep shelves stocked, farmers are dumping fresh milk and plowing vegetables back into the dirt as the shutdown of the food service industry has scrambled the supply chain. Roughly half the food grown in the US was previously destined for restaurants, schools, stadiums, theme parks and cruise ships.
-Smithfield’s Sioux Falls, S.D. pork processing plant, responsible for 4-5% of all U.S. pork production, shuttered earlier this week because COVID-19 had infected nearly 400 employees — almost 10% of all workers (mostly immigrant and speak 26 different languages) and 40% of all S.D. COVID-19 cases.
Other prominent protein plant closures include the Tyson pork plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, and one of the nation’s largest beef packers, JBS in Greely, Col.
From NPR: Some farmers are starting to talk about the almost-unthinkable: the possibility that they’d have to euthanize piglets because there’s no room for them on the farm and little prospect of selling them.
-Before COVID-19 two-thirds of seafood in the U.S. was eaten in restaurants and hotels. Social distancing on fishing boats is typically not possible. The industry is concerned the pandemic will “forever alter” the way people eat fish, as industry was already dealing with climate change’s impact on ocean waters. Operators are freezing excess inventory normally sold fresh to hold onto hope.
From Civil Eats: “Right now, to keep these [fishermen] going, we’re cutting it and freezing it and hedging our bets that in two to three months, it’ll start to slowly come back, and we’ll have the inventory to sell it,” said Juillard. Marder is selling some fish to European supermarkets now, though demand has dropped 50 percent there, and 95 percent in the U.S., over the past month, he said.
-Wait, there’s more.
From Prospect.org: In Wisconsin, dairy farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of unbought milk into manure ponds; in Florida, vegetable growers are plowing under millions of pounds of vegetables. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Mississippi-based Sanderson Farms has begun breaking and throwing out hundreds of thousands of chicken-hatching eggs rather than raising the chicks for meat. An estimated 7 percent of all milk produced in the last week was dumped, good for 3.7 million gallons a day. And that number is expected to rise.
Within the next 60 days or so, we will start to see access to the availability many foods decline, and isolation-weary consumers will have to contend with a new set of choices they surely never had to face unless they are old enough too have lived through the Depression.
What can we do? Yes, a Victory Garden is a good start — more than a century ago after World War I broke out America grew an estimated 1.45 million quarts of home canned food that provided for growers and alleviated supply chains (railcars usually transporting food prioritized transporting military). But if you’re in Michigan (and maybe other places?), seeds and plants are among those items banned to sell because of COVID-19, which seems quite counterintuitive.
In the same urgent way we’ve learned a lesson in what workers are truly essential during times of crisis, we need to help farmers find healthy, willing and compliant workers who are able to pick and process crops safely and for a wage that matches the current risks.
–From USA Today: But then when the coronavirus outbreak flared in March, the U.S. suspended routine immigrant and nonimmigrant visa processing services, raising concerns from American farms about being cut off from this labor supply.
The U.N. warned earlier this week that the global food supply could be threatened by COVID-19 because of a “complex web of interactions.” Grovara is in the export business and we know the U.S. imports only about 15% of its food, so this is a problem we all share.
We implore governments across the globe to prioritize keeping trade channels open and eliminating existing restrictions (like export taxes and export bans) whenever possible. Also, in much the same way American governors are banding together to form regional alliances that will help determine when to “open back up,” this crisis is the ideal moment to forge regional trading relationships that mitigate reliance on global chains.
If we work quickly, we can stem the waste by redirecting, adjust logistics like packaging and distribution, and kickstart increased production when appropriate.