Pat Sutphin/Times-News via AP
Over 4,000 gallons of milk pour down the drain last week at Azevedo Family Dairy in Buhl, Idaho.
The coronavirus crisis has exposed some serious frailty in America’s supply chains. To this point, those deficiencies have been most glaring when it comes to medical supplies. The country remains unable to produce or otherwise procure a satisfactory quantity of N95 masks, testing swabs, and ventilators. Toilet paper, too, is famously in short supply.
As the virus has keyed off an economic shutdown, breakdowns have emerged in other parts of the supply chain as well. Now, America’s food systems have begun to falter, resulting in the twin curses of scarcity and excess. In the early days of the shutdown, pictures circulated of barren shelves at supermarkets (much of it wrongfully blamed on binge purchasing). Now, however, the most objectionable food news comes in the form of crop dumping. All over the country, America’s producers have begun destroying excess, perishable crops that they can’t bring to market.
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.
Those reports, along with the indelible images they’ve produced, provide a stark contrast to sparsely populated grocery-store shelves, or severely strained food banks and miles-long breadlines that have become commonplace throughout the country. Ten thousand families recently sought help from the San Antonio Food Bank. As some have pointed out, it makes for a rather on-the-nose comparison to a 1930s Grapes of Wrath–era level of inequality and cruelty.
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.
While some restaurants have begun selling their excess supply as groceries, it will be difficult to scale that up nationwide. Meanwhile, raw products delivered commercially would have to be repackaged to sell in retail outlets, and suppliers would have to somehow win contracts with grocery stores for shelf space, a tall order even for big companies, let alone new entrants with no such experience. Setting up a large-scale delivery procedure conveying excess food to needy food banks takes time, money, and manpower, all of which are already in short supply at financially strained farms. The federal government could step in, guarantee payments to farmers, and provision for such a transfer, but they’ve shown no interest in doing so.
The disruption to the food supply chain is not likely to be short-term. With demand plummeting, prices on commodities like corn and soy have fallen, too, putting farmers in a bigger bind economically. Commodity prices have been dropping for years, but here the timing couldn’t be worse: Spring is planting season, which means that farmers are currently making decisions on how much to plant for the coming year. Low prices, low demand, and limited access to markets could mean that farmers are forced to curtail production dramatically. “Demand patterns are changing so abruptly in ways we've never seen happen before, in just a matter of weeks,” Mike Stranz, vice president of advocacy at the National Farmers Union, told me. “Are lenders going to be willing to finance farmers this year with projected low prices and lower demand? The concern is now turning more towards the commodity side of things.”
Those problems aren’t just limited to crop prices; there’s a burgeoning labor problem as well. For any crops that have traditionally relied on foreign labor, like vegetables and dairy, the closure of embassies, particularly in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, has meaningfully stemmed the flow of farmhands and processors. That, in part, has led to certain farmworkers, many of whom are of dubious status, to be deemed essential workers. But as they continue to work, they risk exposing the rest of the labor pool to the coronavirus contagion, and there are few workers to replace them once they fall ill. Already, we’ve seen this happen in meatpacking plants, which have become hotbeds of disease. Last week, a startling 80 cases of coronavirus were traced back to a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. At least three workers at Tyson have died of it. Some plants, like Sanderson Farms in Georgia, have cut back production as a precaution, which drives more shortages.
The CARES Act, Congress’s multitrillion-dollar corporate bailout bonanza, did allocate $9.5 billion in aid for farmers and growers. But given the scale of the problem, that number is, like much of the noncorporate bailout part of the bill, woefully inadequate. Already there’s been confusion as to which overmatched federal agency is responsible for meting out that money. Farmers have long been excluded from the Small Business Administration in favor of the Department of Agriculture, which has historically handled federal financing. The delay compounds the misery already being felt by the country’s farmers, who have borne the brunt of the trade war with China, and just last year were ravaged by record floods in the Midwest.
As these factors conspire, it’s likely that the strain on the food system will only get more severe over the coming months. It could prove a major issue long after the coronavirus has peaked and the economy returns to its “reopened” state. Right now, there is no concern that the U.S. will be unable to produce enough calories to feed its population, but there’s plenty of reason to believe the worst is yet to come. Lowered production could play into shortages, exacerbated by farmer bankruptcies, if substantial financing is not available to bridge the gap. “Those impacts are going to be rolling upon us for months here and maybe years,” said Stranz. Diminished supply could result in higher prices as well, which would be devastating as the country works its way back from unemployment forecasted as high as 30 percent.
The political implications of these food supply disruptions could be significant, too. Almost to the letter, the states experiencing the most profound effects of this—Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, even Arizona (a source of vegetables)—are swing states. Neither party has shown a willingness to provide them with the relief they desperately need (though a candidate with some political savvy could well take advantage of this fast-moving crisis to curry favor ahead of November’s election).
In any other circumstance, we would likely turn to imports to help make up the difference. But the coronavirus has foreclosed that avenue as well. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, “port backups that have paralyzed food shipments around the world for weeks aren’t getting much better. In fact, in some places, they’re getting worse.” Ports in the Philippines, through which much of the world’s rice is shipped, are shut down. At ports in Honduras and Guatemala, through which the bulk of our coffee is routed, curfews have diminished capacity severely. India has banned exports on staples like rice entirely, while the country’s lockdown means that food processed there is not hitting the world market. The only place where ports are running normally is off-the-rails coronavirus-denier Brazil.
The fate of millions of Americans through this crisis will be determined not by large corporations’ ability to service debt, but by simple access to food. Food stamp enrollment has exploded in the last few weeks, and will continue to surge as the crisis mounts. Last week in California, nearly 100,000 new families applied for the state’s food stamp benefits, CalFresh. Precisely at this moment, the country’s food systems are failing. The breadlines are just the beginning.
