COVID-19 has exposed the flaws in a centralised food system controlled by a few giant corporations. To be resilient to shocks, we need food systems to be diverse, small scale and local.
With so many links in our just-in-time food supply chain – from producer, to grader, to packer, to wholesaler, to regional distributor, to supermarket, and eventually to your plate – it takes one break and the whole system backs up. And right now it’s like a multi-car pile up.
The world’s biggest meat companies – including
Smithfield Foods Inc, Cargill Inc, JBS USA and Tyson Foods Inc – have halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America since April as workers fall ill from Covid19, stoking global fears of a meat shortage with daily production cut by 25%. With the loss of meat packing plants, thousands of already fattened pigs remain on American and Canadian farms.
There is no room for ‘waiting’ in the factory farming world, time is money after all, pigs are but a commodity. So it means that 200,000 pigs are being culled in Minnesota, the second biggest hog producing state in the US. Iowa, the largest, could face killing 700,000
every week. The farmers are forced to inject the sows to make them abort their litters, or euthanising the piglets, usually by agonising
suffocation with carbon dioxide. The bodies of the ‘euthanised’ are composted and will become fertilizer at a time when the US is in a crisis that has idled millions of workers and forced many to rely on food banks. Killing animals for no purpose exposes the intrinsic risks in our global food system.
A representative from Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, said they had two options in this crisis; “to continue to operate and sustain the nation’s food supply” or to shut their plants to “insulate employees from risk”. The fact is that the plants’ working conditions have allowed the COVID-19 virus to spread in employee populations because of their failure to sufficiently increase PPE or improve working conditions.
“One reason the North American industry is so efficient is we can produce a lot of meat in a short amount of time,”
said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. “To do that you need a lot of employees working very closely together. So the same characteristics that make our industry efficient are also what this virus preys upon.”
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