By
Katherine Kam
When
the coronavirus pandemic began, Americans not only worried about
getting sick, but were alarmed by depleted grocery shelves,
predictions of food shortages, meat plant shutdowns, and headlines
about supply chains breaking. Several months into the pandemic, the
U.S. food supply has taken its hits but remains undaunted.
All
those bare shelves? "They wer dramatic, but not emblematic,"
says Daniel Sumner, PhD, a distinguished professor of agricultural
and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. Early
on, panicked consumers raced to stockpile canned goods, rice, dreid
beans, and other staples, creating eerie impressions of scarcity in
stories. But the food supply chain has remained surprisingly strong,
according to Sumner. "It's much more resilient and solid now
than I would ahve thought 2 months ago."
During
the pandemic, meat processing businesses appeared to be the weakest
link throughout the food supply chain. Meat processing plants have
been virus hot spots as workers have fallen ill with COVID-19, some
of them dying. Starting in early April, affected plants began
closing. "Millions of pounds of meat will disappear,"
warned John Tyson, chairman of the major meat producer Tyson Foods.
'The food supply chain is breaking."
Tyson
also revealed that his company had put new safety measures in place:
taking workers' temperatures, increasing cleaning and sanitizing, and
using social distancing. Other meat processing companies made
similar changes.
As
plants closed from outbreaks, the industry took to publicly calling
on the federal government to intervene and keep meat operations
running. Whether U.S. consumers truly faced meat shortages from
shuttered plants has since been called into question. On June 16,
The New York Times ran an article stating that while companies were
sounding an alarm, they exported 129,000 tons of pork to China in
April.
"The
meat companies were saying that the sky was falling and it really
wasn't," Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist at Food Waler Watch, a consumer and environmental watchdog group," told the Times. "It
wasn't that there was not enough supply. It was that the supply was
being sent abroad."
The
data on meat exports "is potentially embarrassing for an
industry that trumpeted its role in feeding the American public to
argue to keep plants operating during the pandemic," 2waccording
to the article. It also said 'the industry stands by its warning
about shortages and the need to keep the plants operating.' Amid the
controversy, the situation has returned close to normal.
In
late April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order
declaring meat processing plants essential infrastructure and ordered
them to remain open. Plants have reopened, even though some workers
have protested that conditions remain unsafe.
By
mid-June, the meatpacking industry was back to operating at 97%
capacity, says Sumner, who also directs the University of
California's Agricultural Issues Center.
Fruits
and Vegetables not Disrupted
The
produce sector has remained relatively unscathed, Sumner says.
"We
have been waiting and thinking that we may end up with significant
outbreaks among farm-workers," he says. "But there hasn't
been a disruption there."
It's
possible that many farm-workers might have already gotten sick and
recovered without seeking treatment, he says. Certainly, the
conditions exist for a COVID-19 outbreak. "Many of the people
we talk about in the food system are among the poorest in North
America. The vulnerability is really a function of the poverty,"
Sumner says.
The
majority of farm-workers are immigrants, often from Mexico, he says.
"The biggest concern is how people live. When you're poor, you
have a harder time keeping your distance, either because your work
requires you to be with people or you live very closely with people
in a small apartment. It's hard to stay safe in that context."
"That
is something we've been worried about, but there's been no widespread
impact on the food systme.' Sumner says.
Weak
Links in the Chain
While
the nation's food supply has remained abundant, the pandemic has
exposed the system's flaws--a stress test of sorts.
Decades
of consolidation in U.S. Agriculture have been shown to pose risks.
For example, the country has plenty of food animals, but there was a
bottleneck at the meatpacking plants, where a limited number of major
factories control much of the industry. "It's really stark in
the case of meats," Sumner says.
"Having
such a concentrated sector is not good," says Miguel Gomez, PhD,
an associate professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied
Economics and Management at Cornell University. He specializes in
studying food supply chains.
"Our
food supply chain is resilient in general, but in the short run, this
pandemic demonstrated that it doesn't respond to crisis as quickly as
we need."
For
example, the U.S. food supply chain has been too inflexible to shift
a glut of products from the weakened food service sector (which
includes restaurants, hotels, university dining halls, and other
places that serve food outside of the home) to the supermarket
sector.
"Before
the pandemic, an average consumer would have spent half of his food
purchase budget in the supermarket to prepare at home and half in
restaurants, cafeterias, and the like," Gomez says.
"The
food service supply chain is completely disconnected fromt he
supermarket supply chain," he says. When farmers and suppliers
lost business in the food service sector as clients shut down, it was
difficult for them to pivot to the supermarket sector.
"That's
why we saw vegetables not being harvested and milk being dumped,"
Gomez says. "At the same time, we saw empty shevles in the
stores. That shows that all the milk and foods that were heading ot
the restaurants didn't make their way to the supermarkets and they
were wasted."
Therefore,
the issue isn't shortages, but re-purposing, not an easy problem to
remedy quickly. "The problem is that if you're bringing lettuce
to supermarkets, you have to worry about labels and
information--different boxes, different types of trucking."
"If
you think about lettuce going to a restaurant like McDonald's or any
food service, you have larger packages without the labels, without
any branding."
"This
pandemic made evident that with that degree of specialization, we
failed in re-purposing foods faster, especially perishable products,"
Gomez says.
Specialization
is highly efficient, but "thinking about just economic
efficiency is very myopic. We need to think about resilience and how
we can find ways in which food can be repurposed fromt he supermarket
channel to food service, and vice versa," he says.
One
solution would be to have distributors that can handle food for
restaurants and supermarkets alike. "We need to make sure we
have a secure flow of products so we don't have these disruptions
that cause food waste and stockouts [lack of store inventory],"
Gomez says.
Sumner
points out other significant risks in the system. "One of the
things we're vulnerable about," he says, "is how is the
food service system going to come back?"
That
sector is having a tough time planning for future trends, with so
many unknowns. For example, Sumner's not sure his campus will open
for in-person classes in the fall, a dilemma that bedevils
universities across the land. if students come flocking back, would
they live in the dorms and eat in the dining halls?
Will
restaurants make a comeback? "I've seen headlines that said
restaurants have come back faster than somebody thought, and the next
headline says nobody is yet going to restaurants," Sumner says.
"We
really don't know what's going to happen. We don't know how fast
things are coming back. it really is the case that there's lots of
uncertainty."
Food
Banks Also Face Supply Chain Problems
Food
remains ample for people with enough income or government benefits,
according to Sumner. "I don't think there's any question that
people who have the resources are going to have access to plenty of
healthy food."
But
food insecurity poses a growing threat, especially with the exploding
numbers of people who have lost jobs in the wake of shutdowns. Many
have lined up for miles in their cars and waited for hours for good
giveaways.
"The
increase in the number of people that are turning to food banks for
help is about 60% more on average, compared to the same time last
year," says Zuani Villarreal, director of communication for
Feeding America.
Feeding
America, the country's largest hunger relief organization, is a
nationwide network of 200 food banks that partner with 60,000 food
pantries, meal programs, community centers, and shelters to provide
food to people in need. Feeding America estimates that due tot he
pandemic, more than 54 million people in the U.S. will struggle with
hunger in 2020, including a potential 18 million children.
Already,
the effects have been staggering. No food bank has remained
untouched, according to Villarreal. During a natural disaster, one
or two food banks might be affected, but neighboring ones can step up
to assist, she says. "This pandemic is really impacting all 200
food banks, and that is something that is unprecedented. We've
never seen something like this so quickly have an effect on the
supply chains and the increased demand."
Food
banks are also trying to adapt to disrupted supply chains, Villarreal
says.
Before
the pandemic, Feeding America relied on several avenues for food
donations, including farmers, restaurants, caterers, and hotels.
Traditionally, though, the largest donors have been retail grocery
stores that give away excess food. But as stay-at home orders spread
across the country, grocery stores faced so much demand that they no
longer could divert as many products to food banks, Villarreal says.
Donations form restaurants and hotels also fell.
"We've
seen contractions throughout the supply chain," she says.
With
donations down, "food banks are having to purchase more products
than before," she says. They've scrambled to buy food from
manufacturers and distributors and other sources. Still, they can't
always purchases what they need, Villarreal says. "The
availability has been limited."
For
many Americans, it's been unsettling to se images of crowds lining up
for food whole farmers destroy crops and dairies dump milk.
To
help bridge this disconnect, in April, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture announced its Farmers to Families Food Box Program.
Under the new effort, the federal government purchases fresh produce,
dairy, and meat from small farms and works with food banks and other
groups to distribute the boxes to people in need. By early June, the
program had distributed 5 million food boxes, with plans to expand
that number to 40 million by June 30, according to a USDA press
release
While
Gomez views the effort as an important start, he believes the
federal government needs to increase the program's funding and "scale
up because there are many people in need."
Changes
in the Food Landscape
While
experts aren't concerned that the country will run low on food,
shocks to supply chains have changed the food landscape. Shoppers
have paid higher prices at the grocery store, for example.
Furthermore,
Gomez and Sumner say that people won't always be able to get the cut
of meat or the brand of yogurt they want. "What we're seeing
now is that the variety, the assortment of food in the grocery
stores, is less," Gomez says. "That's going to be a change
because in this country, we've been used to having all produces
year-round, all the different brands that we want."
Finally,
Gomez says, "We are entering a recession. For many households,
income is going to drop. if I were a farmer or a food manufacturer,
I would be thinking that these people will shift from fancy specialty
foods to more basic foods at lower prices. I think that's going to
be a trend that's going to affect the supply chains. I think we're
going to see that very soon."
Source:
www.webmdcom
