Hey there,
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
If you’re new to Before The Cutting Board, here’s how it works: The “This Week” section focuses on news and current events, while the “Food Fights” section usually explores some of the interesting debates flying around the food news world.
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Without further ado, let’s dig in.
- This Week-
Another backup brewing in Shanghai
As part of China’s “Zero-COVID” policy, Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been under an extremely strict lockdown for the last five weeks and counting. In addition to creating disruptions in food access for residents, the quarantine has delivered another tough blow to supply chains that have already been hobbled by shortages. Since Shanghai is a major hub in particular for semiconductors and electronics, the industries that will be most immediately impacted are automakers, electronics, and consumer goods (think air fryers and pressure cookers). However, lessons from the havoc wreaked by the supply chain crisis over the last two years have shown that backups and a rush to relieve shortages in other industries seriously impact global food trade.
Last fall, when the supply chain jam peaked, US ports - especially California ports - were overwhelmed with containers to unload, causing the turnaround time for those containers to double. Typically, once containers at these ports are emptied, they are booked and filled by farmers with food exports such as dairy ingredients, tree nuts, rice, and more. But, the delays in container turnaround combined with the higher demand for goods coming from Asia, created a perfect storm in which shippers were more incentivized to return to Asia rather than wait for farmers to fill up containers. The most recent supply chain chaos brewing in Shanghai is raising questions about what the long-term effects will be, considering consumers are already absorbing the burden of last year’s fall-out.
Farmers globally navigate continuous curveballs
The shortage and price fallouts from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the escalating impacts of climate change, have put food producers across the world in a tough position. Here are some recent stories reporting on the dynamics that farmers and their surrounding communities are navigating:
Farmers are Struggling to Keep Up as Fertilizer Prices Surge
After five record crops, heat wave threatens India’s wheat output, export plans
Oyster reefs in Texas are disappearing. Fishermen there fear their jobs will too
Dry Weather Forecast Calls For Higher Food Prices - And Billions in Farm Losses
Honorable Mentions: Millions of Bees Bound for Alaska Are Rerouted and Die in Atlanta
-Food Fights-
The Consequences of Factory Farming
Rural communities across the Midwest are reeling from the slow violence inflicted by the rise of factory farming and intense monopolization across livestock industries. This week, two reports came out documenting the battles between small, Midwestern communities and the factory farms that are decimating their livelihoods.
Today’s piece from the Guardian centers on factory hog farms in Iowa, shedding light on how consolidation in the pork industry has led to a 90% drop in hog farms and a 70% drop in farmer pay. Beyond the decline in small farms, the rise of factory farming has also made living conditions untenable - from contaminated water supply to the closure of many local businesses, including grocery stores. Earlier this week, Grist covered a similar scenario in Wisconsin where residents are calling for stricter limits on factory farm pollution. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it’s really difficult to hold factory farms accountable for pollution or other public health harms due to protections put in place at the state level called “right-to-farm” laws. In March, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork and hog producer as well as the owner of 11 major factory farms, was fined only $18,000 for spilling 300,000 gallons of manure into local water streams.
In the last few years, politicians have put together legislation that would phase out factory farms, require the corporations that own factory farms to bear the cost of pollution and accidents, and incentivize small-scale livestock farming. If this type of legislation can get past the lobbies, that would be great. But, using a policy fix to get rid of factory farms is not enough in my opinion. We should be more deeply investigating the ties between the rise of factory farming in the US and our political system. These reports make it clear that protection for the conglomerates that run these factory farms was prioritized at the state and federal level in the interest of well-funded lobbies with the power to influence politicians. This comes at the direct expense of the environmental and social prosperity in these areas. The end result is a food system with a concentration of wealth that marginalizes the communities in which it is situated.
Examining the consequences of factory farms and changing the system that has enabled them to become so prolific requires that we take a hard look at which institutions have embraced them and why.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)