Food Shortages?

With the collapse of the entire world economy overnight, exports have plummeted, which means that at least for now, there is lots of meat in the United States. But that is not necessarily stable, especially as COVID-19 rips through meatpacking plants. Conditions for meatpackers are horrible at the best of the times, with The Jungle replicated in Kansas and Iowa with undocumented Central Americans instead of in Chicago with Lithuanians and Poles. These workers are forced to work very close together in often cold conditions with sharp knives and fast-moving machines. Working together in cold conditions is perfect for the spread of the coronavirus. And we are now seeing meatpacking plants start to close as their workers get sick.

Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork processor, said on Sunday it will shut a U.S. plant indefinitely due to a rash of coronavirus cases among employees and warned the country was moving “perilously close to the edge” in supplies for grocers.

Slaughterhouse shutdowns are disrupting the U.S. food supply chain, crimping availability of meat at retail stores and leaving farmers without outlets for their livestock.

Smithfield extended the closure of its Sioux Falls, South Dakota, plant after initially saying it would idle temporarily for cleaning. The facility is one of the nation’s largest pork processing facilities, representing 4% to 5% of U.S. pork production, according to the company.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said on Saturday that 238 Smithfield employees had active cases of the new coronavirus, accounting for 55% of the state’s total. Noem and the mayor of Sioux Falls had recommended the company shut the plant, which has about 3,700 workers, for at least two weeks.

“It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running,” Smithfield Chief Executive Ken Sullivan said in a statement on Sunday. “These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers.”

While the pretend concern for public health from a meat CEO does not warm the heart, Sullivan does have a question that we may have to ask at some point:

“We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19,” he said.

We aren’t going to starve. There is lots of food production, particularly grain and processed foods, that is highly automated and there’s no reason why that would become an issue. But there are a lot of foods, especially meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables, that require large number of workers to grow, butcher, process, plant, pick, and get to market. And if workers stop showing up or if the plants become such vectors of disease that they can’t run, the possibility of actual food shortages in many core parts of the American diet is far from impossible. I could hardly blame workers for choosing not to work, but this is a serious issue that is just starting to make its presence felt.

I’ll note that if there’s anything that will make Americans say that the lockdown really isn’t worth it and that we should just get through the disease at the price of however many lives, it would be the inability to eat meat. Even more than a cancelled NFL season.