Virus spurs concerns over meat supply
Meat processing plants — where physical distancing between workers has proven hard to come by — have increasingly been linked to outbreaks of COVID-19. Across North America, more than a dozen facilities have shuttered due to the disease. As a result of these closures and production slowdowns, some consumers are concerned about the dependability of our meat supply.
Like eggs, flour and toilet paper before it, are we likely to see retail meat shortages? When we make trips to the grocery store, will we be met with empty shelves where stacks of Styrofoam trays laden with ground beef, steaks, rump roasts, pork shoulders and spareribs once were?
According to Mike von Massow, food economist at the University of Guelph, these short-term closures are unlikely to affect food availability. “We don’t anticipate having to deal with any sort of significant shortages at the meat counter in grocery stores across North America,” he said in a statement posted to Youtube.
“We have a well-integrated system in which product moves both ways across the border. So if individual plants close, we will often see both inventories that we have help buffer some of those closures, and the reallocation of supply from some of the other plants.”
Cargill — a meat-packing plant near High River, Alta., which represents “roughly 40 per cent of the beef processing capacity in Canada” — has temporarily ceased operations after one employee died and more than 360 tested positive for COVID-19. Last week, Olymel reopened its meat processing facility in Yamachiche, Que., after a two-week shutdown due to an outbreak. Meanwhile, the union representing workers at the company’s plant in Red Deer, Alta., is calling for a two-week shutdown.
Smithfield Foods shuttered its pork factory in Sioux Falls, S.D., on April 12 after a coronavirus outbreak infected more than 800 workers. The company closed two other facilities, in Missouri and Wisconsin, days later. On April 20, meat company JBS USA shut its pork processing facility in Minnesota after more than two dozen employees tested positive for COVID-19. “Nobody can quite figure out how meat processing workers can safely work alongside one another without running the risk of transmitting the virus,” reported Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
While fears of coming home from the store meatless are unfounded at the moment, von Massow underscores that the conversation as it stands centres on the scale and duration of the plant closures. If more facilities were to close more often, and for longer periods of time, the situation may change.
“We might start seeing some more significant disruption in the system where supplies may be compromised,” he said. “Although we do export a lot and have reasonably good inventories on hand, we might see prices go up. But we would see much more significant issues at the producer level.”
The fact that plant closures and production slowdowns have been short-term is “a bit of good news” for consumers, von Massow said. And while these disruptions will have repercussions, they will likely be felt elsewhere. As meat producers figure out ways to hold or divert animals to alternative processors in an effort to avoid bottlenecks, the discomfort “will be mostly borne at the producer end of the supply chain.”
For farmers, meat processing plant closures can be “disastrous,” Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University, wrote in his newsletter. Because of the pandemic, farmers are facing increased costs as they house animals longer or have to ship them further. Due to high inventory, they’re also often selling their livestock for less. “We should be cognizant of (those pressures),” von Massow said, “and probably look at ways that we could support farmers through those difficult times.”