The Wakeup Call: COVID-19
Could food production or packaging companies shut down (for whatever reason) and actually cause a major shortage of food in your region or even across wealthy, highly developed countries? Considering recent events, it doesn’t sound crazy to imagine that it’s possible even on a global scale.
In fact, food shortages have occurred, even in the US, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Basic staples like rice, flour, meat, canned corn and other shelf-stable vegetables, as well as canned soups and pasta, cat food, and even ketchup packets all became nearly impossible to find in the first 6 months of the pandemic and then sporadically thereafter. Non-food staples like disinfectant spray and hand sanitizers were nearly impossible to find and stores imposed limits even when small shipments arrived. And let’s not even discuss toilet paper!
As the pandemic started, the US food supply was operating smoothly, with only normal, local hiccups due to bad weather and road conditions. As word of lockdowns spread across the country, however, demand for certain products skyrocketed virtually overnight. Once people and their families were isolated at home, they suddenly turned to home-cooked meals and grocery stores didn’t have the stock to meet the spike in demand. Even after the initial hoarding surges were over, most people outside of the service sector either worked from home or were out of work altogether for months on end, so the unprecedented demand for grocery staples continued.
Predictably, suppliers were caught off guard by continued unprecedented demand and shifted their production lines to focus only on popular core products, making certain niche products almost impossible to find. Producers for restaurants and schools, which were shuttered for months, still had difficulty converting to household size items. Manufacturers were unable to keep up with the demand for glass jars and aluminum cans, which meant that even when food products were available, they could not be packaged for sale. Add to that illness outbreaks in processing plants, and a shortage of both shipping containers and truck drivers, and the supply chain was thoroughly broken.
The food shortages during the pandemic, then, were not triggered by any dramatic act of nature - no meteor strikes, or super volcanoes darkened our skies. These shortages arose primarily from the changing patterns of human activity: from where we ate our meals to how we worked. In fact, the experience of the last few years illuminates the potential for significant food shortages if any sort of widespread disturbance occurs in the future. In an interconnected world, even if we’re just talking about fresh asparagus from California or peaches from Georgia, our own neighborhood grocery stores can be hit hard and quickly result in shortages can last for months and years.
It makes sense, then, to learn from the recent past and consider the ways in which we, as individuals, can prepare for the unexpected. We’re not talking building bomb shelters, but it’s possible to think wisely and strategically about ways to ease our own dependency on vulnerable supply chains for one of our most fundamental needs: food.
The Effects of Weather
From drought to winter storms, crop production can be disrupted at almost any time, which can trigger a long-term problem with supply. From devastating freezes across southern states to extended droughts in California and other western states, there are many potential weather concerns.
The effects of climate change are not sudden or entirely unexpected, but emerging crises can rapidly affect crop production before we’re prepared to deal with them. Rising temperatures, changes in precipitation and the resulting availability of fresh water, and extreme weather events all can affect either a single class of crops or nearly all of them. In fact, these changes will also impact meat production, fisheries and other fundamental aspects of our food supply in a cascading flow of shortages. Since grain is at the base of the food chain for cattle, chickens, and even fish, major crop losses in that sector could cause untold disruptions in Americans’ meat-heavy diets.
Transportation
Winter storms frequently cause short-term delays in food delivery to isolated regions as roads are blocked by snow or iced, but cold northern states are generally well prepared to deal with those inconveniences. As weather patterns change, though, more regions are experiencing extreme winter weather and even Florida has received dustings of snow this year. In regions like these, where snow blowers are a foreign concept, a major snow or ice storm could limit deliveries to grocery stores or even consumers’ ability to reach the grocery store.
Supply Chains
During the pandemic, more fundamental problems in supply chains emerged as well. For example, the global shipping container snarl affects everything we buy, sell and use, including food. As the pandemic got started and the population shifted quickly to ecommerce to purchase everything from laundry detergent to clothes, the demand for shipping containers and the ships that carry them skyrocketed as manufacturers in Asia sought to move their product eastward. As traffic between ports increased, alongside infections from the pandemic, there wasn’t enough labor or space to offload and move out cargoes. Trucker shortages meant that arriving cargo couldn’t be quickly distributed to their destination, so it might hang around, literally collecting dust, until trucks were available to receive it. This left little space to offload more shipments. When offloading was backed up, ships full of cargo were left to anchor offshore, waiting for their turn at port, meaning they were unavailable to pick up more shipments that continued to pile up.
This obviously affects the supply of computers, autos, boots and pet toys, but food is shipped via containers too. Fresh fruit from South America, spices from China, wines from France, and coffee from Brazil to Vietnam all arrive via container. Fresh produce, meat, and other perishable items travel in special refrigerated containers, which are in especially high demand. While food production may have been at normal levels early on, even refrigerated foods won’t last forever, and some foods never even reached a shipping container before spoiling.
Supply problems reach even further back in the web as food packaging materials like aluminum, glass, and cardboard are in critically short supply. Not only are beverage makers unable to package their product, but costs for these materials have risen substantially. Suddenly, canning your own tomatoes and beets isn’t an easy solution if canning jars are unavailable.
Amazingly, the global shipping industry is still seriously entangled, even halfway through 2022. Containers are tied up in ports, storage facilities and stranded on vessels around the world. Port congestion and increasing demand as people begin to establish a “new normal” mean the pressure isn’t releasing and there’s no agreement when this sector of the supply chain may recover.
While the US provides much of its own food, this points to the overall vulnerability of the supply chain and its wide-reaching effects. Today, shortages of fertilizer, and even plastic pots are affecting the greenhouse industry and home growers alike. Where lead time on a shipment may have been 2- or 3-days pre-pandemic, some products now may have a projected delivery of 400 days. Clearly, protecting yourself and your family from a potential food shortage involves not only advance planning but early action.
