Unless you don’t know where your next meal is coming from – which is the case for some 800 million people, a number that could increase during the Covid-19 fallout – you’ve probably not thought this much about food before. Going to the supermarket is an ordeal. Your favourite restaurant is closed. Produce is rotting in the fields while unprecedented lines form at food banks.
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Could America’s small- to mid-sized meat processors pick up the lost capacity when large packers have to close? They might. But federal meat-inspection laws and regulations are standing in the way.
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It seems an oasis of good news in a desert of bad: Small farmers who saw restaurant sales evaporate and farmers’ market sales erode, in the wake of Covid-19, have found alternative ways to sell produce. They contribute to boxes sold by shuttered restaurants, sell their own boxes out of their trucks, even offer delivery. And they’re selling retail, not wholesale, so the money’s good.
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“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered.
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Over a year before COVID-19 was first detected, biologists at the University of Warsaw published “Bats, Coronaviruses, and Deforestation,” a paper that links the rapid destruction of the natural habitats of bats to the spread of coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.
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The Farm System Reform Act would prohibit new large factory farms from going into business and force others to cease expansions before halting operations entirely within two decades. Warren's support for the law comes after multiple reports of unsafe conditions in the meatpacking industry amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The coronavirus spread at more than twice the national rate in U.S. counties with major meatpacking plants in the first week after President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing that they be reopened.
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As we face empty grocery shelves the fragility of our highly consolidated food system has become clear during the crisis of COVID-19. We see a market that lacks the resiliency to shift supply lines and fill those shelves, but also a food system that does not provide (and in most cases never has provided) fair wages or adequate safety protection to workers.
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"Multinational corporations have concentrated our food system to its breaking point," said Jake Davis, a Missouri farmer, and national policy director at Family Farm Action, in a statement backing the measure. "Mega meatpackers have extracted profits from farmers, workers, and consumers for too long," he said. "This pandemic has shined a bright light on those abuses."
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More than 700 employees at a Tyson Foods meat factory in Perry, Iowa, have tested positive for the coronavirus as the nation braces for a possible meat shortage due to the pandemic. An Iowa Department of Public Health report released Tuesday showed that 58 percent of the factory's workforce had tested positive for the virus, NBC affiliate WHO of Des Moines reported.
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