munkle
Diamond Member
- Dec 18, 2012
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Getting workers can't be the problem. a hundred thousand aliens at the border would be happy to come to work at the risk of getting sick. Economic damage has caused demand to dry up, restaurants, etc., even as people stand in lines for food.
EDITORIAL: When farmers plow under crops, the tragedy of COVID-19 becomes all the more vivid
We can’t ignore the potential risks to our food supply at a time when no one knows how long the pandemic will affect our economy.
chicago.suntimes.com
America has a food problem.
When, during this pandemic, we see dairy farmers dump milk into ditches and when we see vegetable farmers plow their crops back into the soil, it is tragically obvious that major agricultural markets have dried up.
It is an indication, as well, that our nation faces an unsettling new challenge in getting food to where it is needed most — one that the federal government needs to tackle immediately.
Chicago knows a lot about food. At our height in the last century, we shipped more than 80% of the nation’s meat supply from processing plants at the city’s stockyards. To this day, Illinois remains a key agricultural state that exports food globally.
But the systems needed to efficiently move food to market, especially perishables, take years to develop. Private companies are struggling to redesign them during the coronavirus pandemic, especially at a time when some of their own workers have fallen ill or are afraid to come to work.
Editorials
We’re not facing anything like history’s worst famines. As food historian and author Cynthia Clampitt tells us, people in the past often relied on a single crop. If that failed, they had little or nothing. Americans still have a wide array of food to choose from. If we can’t get pork, we can eat something else. Most food experts don’t see an immediate threat to food supplies.
The waiting game
But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the potential risks to our food supply at a time when no one knows how long the pandemic will affect our economy. Big meat-processing companies have temporarily closed or reduced production at plants in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Iowa. Smithfield Foods announced on Sunday it would shutter a processing plant indefinitely in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that produces more than 5 percent of the nation’s pork. That places the nation’s meat supply “perilously close” to a shortage, in the words of one company executive.
Meanwhile, farmers are destroying beans, squash, onion, cabbage and other crops instead of sending them to market. Hundreds of thousands of eggs are being destroyed instead of being used to grow chickens for meat. Worldwide, nations are halting or limiting exports of wheat, legumes and other food.