Has the United States’ response to the global COVID-19 pandemic proven just how insecure its food supply chain is? Among other countries around the globe, the United States has become an example for why the current agriculture industry has created an unsustainable system that falls apart when put under stress. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, food supply chains have become increasingly strained to the point of near collapse. Similarly, factory farm practices increase the risk for food security and increase the risk of the emergence of a new infectious disease. While boasting many benefits to humanity, industrial agriculture and the modern food supply chain in its current form pose a serious national security threat to not only the United States but the entire global system. Other more sustainable farming practices and food supply chain avenues must therefore be explored and adopted widely, in order to boost food security.
The World’s Response to COVID-19
When the international community became aware of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 virus in early January 2020, politicians saw this as the beginning of the end (Landon 2020). There was no previous playbook on how to handle a pandemic of such enormous proportions; the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), H1N1 (bird flu), HIV, and Ebola outbreaks were relatively recent encounters for humanity with deadly diseases that threatened the international system, but none of these came close to how intensely infectious COVID-19 has proven to be. Basically, the nature of COVID-19’s ability to rapidly spread through a population meant that the world needed to respond to this infectious disease in an unprecedented way and fast.
Around the world, countries began to shift into a state of quarantine and social isolation almost as soon as news about the spread of COVID-19 made these measures abundantly clear to the general population. Of course, different countries and different states approached the pandemic with varying degrees of intensity, but the responses that ensued where a part of a globally Incorporated multilateral effort at combating this novel virus. Social distancing decrees were put in place; states mandated limits on how many people could enter essential businesses; people were required to wear face masks in any public sphere they entered–these are just a few of the measures taken in an individual basis to flatten the curve of the spread of COVID-19.
With regards to the world’s economic systems, not only did the United States’ economy come to a screeching halt; the entire global trade and transportation systems were effectively shut down. Flights were barred from entering new countries. Students committed to studying abroad were forced to cancel their plans and return home if deemed safe. Both the United States educational systems and its nonessential businesses where largely forced to shift to a system of remote operation via the internet–if possible–or have their operations be suspended indefinitely. Put simply, economies across the globe were brought to a near standstill in anticipation of the rapid spread of COVID-19–and the people have felt the weight of these decisions deeply.
Food Security During a Pandemic Shutdown
In the early months of the response to COVID-19, there was just one thing on many people’s minds: “I need to stockpile. NOW!” At the time of the initial outbreak, the severity and duration of COVID-19’s intense presence was widely unknown. People did not know exactly how the disease was spread let alone how to protect themselves from it, so many sought to physically avoid other people entirely and abide by the government’s stay at home orders. Of course, individuals still have basic needs that must be met even at home; this is where the hording mentality begins to truly show itself.
The massive lack of knowledge on the ramifications of spread of COVID-19 and the near complete economic shutdown shocked many people into a state of panic and fear of the unknown. Due to the ramifications of COVID-19, the United Nations projected on April 21st, 2020 that, “…the number of people facing severe food insecurity worldwide could double to 265 million. [That] same week, in the United States, the five-week total of job losses rose to a staggering 26 million, pushing millions more into food insecurity,” (Welsh 2020).
People felt as though they could no longer expect for food to always be within arm’s reach. Millions around the globe flocked to food outlets in anticipation of a long stay at home. People bought whatever goods they could get their hands on. From entire swaths of toilet paper being cleared off the shelves the moment they were stocked, to full barrels of garlic being completely cleaned out in multiple grocery stores every day–I personally experienced both of these scenarios on multiple occasions throughout the pandemic–, people were buying goods and supplies faster the than grocery stores could provide them. Many stores across the United States even went as far as to limit the number of any given item a person could purchase, to allow for more people to get what they needed immediately.
The huge ramp-up in the rate at which people were buying goods and necessities was the first of many future signs that pointed to a potentially frail food supply chain. Michael Corkery and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times wrote the following statement on April 13th, 2020:
“The nation’s food supply chain is showing signs of strain, as increasing numbers of workers are falling ill with the coronavirus in meat processing plants, warehouses and grocery stores… The issues follow nearly a month of stockpiling of food and other essentials by panicked shoppers that have tested supply networks as never before… [and] the illnesses have the potential to cause shortages lasting weeks for a few products, creating further anxiety for Americans already shaken by how difficult it can be to find high-demand staples like flour and eggs.”
(Corkery & Yaffe-Bellany 2020)
Albeit a significant portion of the mass purchasing of various goods was the result of panic buying in an increasingly hysterical population. Nevertheless, the fact that massive stores, designed to continuously meet the needs of customer’s consumption of goods, could so rapidly lose their entire stocks of goods and necessities and be able to feasibly replace their stocks within a relatively short time frame brings to light a fundamental flaw in the way we meet our demands for sustenance and supplies. The modern food supply chain is based on a flawed system that forces unnecessary fragility onto the average person, and this is initially predicated upon the center of this failing system: the industrial agriculture sector.
The Inherent Unsustainability of Industrial Agriculture
As economic output and the quality of life for humanity exploded following the industrial revolution, so did the population size. Over time, the continuous lowering of the infant mortality rate coupled with an increase in the life expectancy age in these newly industrialized nations meant there where going to be more hungry mouths to feed that were going to stay around for a longer period of time. As is the case with all resources, food is subject to the scarcity dilemma. In order to feed the ever-increasing populations of industrialized nations, humanity needed to come up with a solution to solve this issue of food scarcity. Fortunately, advances in technology allow for people to make better use of a resource that they once thought was already being used to its maximum potential–food production is no exception to this.
Steadily, farm processes for food production began utilizing the latest in technological innovations. From the cotton gin of 1793 that rapidly increased the cotton industry’s productivity (History.com 2010), to the invention of the first oil powered tractor in 1892 (froelichtractor.com), to the invention of Golden Rice in 1999, a genetically modified organism (GMO) (Mayer); advancements in agriculture technology continue to allow for achievement in the once seemingly impossible task of keeping up with the constant increases in the demand for more food. With the intention of increasing production yields while reducing the cost of production as much as possible, these technologies have slowly conglomerated their uses into an overarching system commonly known as industrial agriculture.
As alluded to earlier; industrial agriculture is the process of mass producing crops and animals for consumption, and it typically utilized chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, genetically modified crops often which are genetically identical breeds, pesticides, and generally the latest in farm related technological advancements such as in tractors and irrigation systems–all of which heavily rely on the mass consumption of oil to fuel the industry (NRDC 2020). Along with these, a standard practice in industrial agriculture is to specialize in the production of a few to just one breed of crops or animals. The following figures were reported by Jacy Reese Anthis of sentienceinstitute.org in 2019:
“We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.”
(Anthis 2019)
The entire industrial agriculture system is designed to do just one thing: lower production costs through technological advancement and specialization. By opting to heavily specialize in the production of as few variations of crops or animals as possible these farms devote all their resources to whatever they specialize in. In doing so, they function less like a traditional farm and more like a factory–hence the common referral to these as “factory farms”. Fundamental to the idea of factory farms is their specific specializations; therefore, fundamental to the idea of factory farms is their degradation of biodiversity in both the ecosystems they remove to set up shop and their systems once already established.
The nature of the modern factory farm process means that biodiversity absolutely must take a backseat in order to simplify the production process. Unfortunately, a lack of biodiversity in the production realm of the food supply chain, as well as the production processes generally, is highly unsustainable in the long term and poses a serious threat to food security in countries worldwide.
Factory Farming the Growing Risk to Food Security
As outlined, the industrial agricultural practice of factory farming results in a drastic decrease in biodiversity through the use of massive farms full of genetically identical produce. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat to food security that this lack of biodiversity holds is highly apparent. Pathogens, such as COVID-19, specialize in their ability to attack a host organism and eventually destroy it before it gets destroyed. Through the process of evolution, pathogens slowly evolve to be better equipped to devastate what ever their target may be. An important detail to this process is that high levels of biodiversity in a given ecosystem act as a barrier to destruction by pathogens. In nature it is rare for there to be just one type of flora or fauna in abundance over a large territory. Instead, ecosystems typically boast an array of different species, and each species even boasts an array of genetic diversity. All these factors make it more difficult for pathogens to evolve fast enough to destroy most ecosystems that have a high enough level of biodiversity.
The greater the levels of genetic diversity in a given ecosystem, the healthier and more resilient the ecosystem will be to pathogens. Conversely, the less genetically diverse an ecosystem is, the more fragile and susceptible it will be to pathogens. By this logic, factory farms are therefore an extremely at-risk ecosystem that is highly likely to succumb to an infectious disease–especially considering the rampant use of genetically identical crops in industrial agriculture. A quick look at the mass production process of bananas will highlight the importance of this concept.
Bananas were and continue to be a massively mono-cultured food source, held upright by unsustainable practices. Up until 1960 a banana species known as the “Gros Michel” was mass produced throughout Central and South America in banana farms that were densely packed. Due to the lack of genetic diversity and biodiversity on these farms, a fungus known as the Panama disease was able to evolve enough to prey on the Gros Michel crops. Discovered in the soil of many banana plantations by scientists only in 1910, by 1960 the Gros Michel became effectively extinct due to the mass spread of this fungus throughout the banana farms. Being the billion-dollar industry that it was, a new banana species was desperately needed to keep the industry alive.
Eventually a substitute, the “Cavendish”, was found and mass production of it began immediately. As is fundamental to the nature of factory farms, the cost of production needed to stay relatively low, so the Cavendish was planted in the same exact farms and on the same exact plots of land as the Gros Michel. Due to the fact that these plots of land were already infected with the Panama disease fungus, and due to the fact that the banana factory farms used almost completely genetically identical Cavendish bananas, it would only be a matter of time before the Panama disease would evolve to be able to prey on a new host. And evolve it did, for the Cavendish now faces the same doomed fate as the Gros Michel did and to almost the same exact disease. Millions of dollars are being poured into research and development for how to make production of the Cavendish as resilient to Panama disease as possible, but this is ultimately a costly futile attempt at resisting what is destined to come to this unsustainable practice (Franklin 2016).
While providing for a great example of the sustainability issues of low genetic diversity factory farming processes, the banana crop is far from being the only one that suffers from issues like the ones mentioned here. Cattle are frequently put in a constant state of being strapped to a feeder full of corn–which they do not naturally consume; their stomachs are specifically designed to digest grass–and standing in an ankle deep pool of feces. Of course, this puts a massive amount of stress on the animals, so they are constantly loaded up with antibiotics meant to stop the spread of infections due to these conditions that create herds of immune-compromised livestock. “Antibiotics [are] transforming innocent farm animals into disease factories. The animals become sources of deadly microorganisms, such as the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)… which is resistant to several major classes of antibiotics and has become a real problem in hospitals,” (Wenner Moyer 2016). The industrial agricultural practices on factory farms slowly create the perfect scenario for antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” to evolve and break out into a population. Chickens, pigs, and fish all face similar situations in these “ultra-efficient” factory farms and produce their own array of diseases. As for crop production, one need not look any further than corn to see how unsustainable modern industrial agriculture truly is.
In the United States, corn is at the center of virtually all things produced. In their book titled “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, Michael Pollan discusses at length the reality of the United States’ food supply chain. During this discussion, Pollan spends an immense amount of time describing how industrial corn has found its way into all walks of the American lifestyle:
“Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak… the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.”
(Pollan p. 18)
Corn, at least to Pollan, is the staple crop of industrial agriculture. Corn is planted, harvested by people using machinery that runs on gas containing 10% ethanol derived from corn, eaten by the people who harvested the corn either directly or indirectly, and replanted to repeat this cycle. In a way, farmed corn is made by farmed corn. As Pollan proves in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, corn is easily the most important single crop in the entire agricultural industry. It feeds everything and makes sure the industry keeps churning. This reality of a corn driven world begs the following question: what would happen to the food supply chain and food security if corn faced a similar fate as the Gros Michel and the Cavendish bananas? In the wake of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is a profoundly important question to be considering, not only for corn but for industrial agriculture entirely.
The Buckling of a Complex Food Supply Chain Amidst a Global Pandemic
This entire discussion on the unsustainable practices of factory farms is meant to do one general thing: in the context of the global response to COVID-19, industrial agriculture and the modern food supply chains are proven to have numerous production bottlenecks that, if strained even slightly, can devastate food security and therefore pose a major national security threat. The limiting of economic functionality during the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in the lowering of how many personnel could be used to maintain factory farms; the restriction as a result of COVID-19 on how many people may work to transport foods and necessities and how many may operate the store where these will things will be distributed limits the desperately needed supply of these by the customers of these stores; the creation of a dependence on relatively few genetically identical crops or animals poses a high potential risk of these crops or animals suffering from a similar fate at the Gros Michel banana: all of these are examples of various bottlenecks–of which there are many more– of just how fragile the modern food supply chain really is.
This fragility is no secret, either; people across the United States and the world felt this sentiment when they arrived at grocery stores and could not find the supplies that they might have needed. The impact of COVID-19 on the global economic systems and food supply chains is highly complex, but some of its indirect impacts such as those mentioned have shown humanity that it is currently living in a highly unsustainable and insecure manner.
Granted the reaction to COVID-19 was unprecedented, the ability for a single pathogen to bring the world economy to its knees has shown many among us that we live in a profoundly insecure system. This pandemic has reminded us that it is only a matter of time before a rapidly infectious pathogen such as the Panama disease evolves within the unsustainable factory farm conditions we have created–one that could rival COVID-19 and emaciate our food security an consequently our national and international security. This sentiment is felt by millions around the world; people know that a change is needed, so the only question left is how do we enact that change ourselves? While there is a seemingly endless number of answers to this question, the one that I personally found to be the best immediate solution is the idea of personal self-sufficiency–in order to try and achieve this, people across the globe are planting more and more of their own food supplies.
The Farmer in All of Us: Rising Rates of Homegrown Foods
In the early days of the pandemic, people were looking everywhere for any potential options for food acquisition, as Krystina Shveda with the BBC mentions in their discussion on “How coronavirus is changing grocery shopping”:
“When Covid-19 first began to engulf Europe, and some rushed to the supermarkets to stockpile, others hit the keyboards. Worldwide Google searches for “food delivery” and “local food” reached all-time highs in April. In the UK, people were six times more likely to look for “veg boxes” than a year ago. The crisis made us all re-examine how we get our groceries and where they come from.”
(Shveda)
Grocery stores where both being rapidly depleted, and they posed the potential threat of acting as a point of infection for other people. In a panic, many people sought out any options they could find, resulting in a massive upswing in food delivery services and an increased burden on local food supplies. Reliance on food delivery services was only temporarily sustainable, as the already bottlenecked and otherwise compromised factory farm food supply chain was growing in its inability to properly function.
This meant that people needed to find a different answer to their food needs–a more self-reliant answer. While there is no single best solution to the food security and sustainability problems we are facing, a beginning step in the right direction was hinted at by Shveda in her discussion: veg boxes, or the growth of your own food.
COVID-19 has forced a large portion of humanity to rethink where our food is sourced from and how sustainable is that source. Due to the pandemic, many began to consider the legitimacy of growing your own food. Becoming more and more popular idea, the rising rates of homegrown foods marks a period of increasing discussions on just how sustainably we live, both in terms of the natural environment and in terms of the perpetual way we seek to live:
“As concerns about food security and pricing rise, many people are becoming more interested in gardening as a way to supplement what they buy at the grocery store. Though you probably won’t be able to grow everything you eat, getting some of it from your own backyard can make you more self-sufficient.”
(themountaineer.com 2020)
The most important thing to note here is the idea that you likely will not be able to grow all your food, only some of it. In fact, most people cannot grow all their food; it is just not feasible for everyone. That stated, the purpose of the homegrown foods movement in the wake of COVID-19 is to at least partially guarantee that a portion of our meals will be available on our own accord. It is also designed to reduce the strain we put on food supply chains and our dependency on industrial agriculture. Like solar energy and how they can be used to feed back into the electrical grid, homegrown foods can be sold or given away locally when in abundance, further decreasing our relative dependency on an unsustainable modern food supply chain.
Aside from taking an initiative to grow our own foods, more sustainable farming practices can be implemented that would at the very least reduce the likelihood of massive crop failure due to the spread of an infectious disease. In Chapter 11 of his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan discusses his observations of a highly sustainable farm he studied. While at Joel Salatin’s farm, Pollan describes what he finds in the following manner:
“‘EFFICIENCY’ is the term usually invoked to defend large-scale industrial farms, and it usually refers to the economies of scale that can be achieved bu the application of technology and standardization. Yet Joel Salatin’s farm makes the case for a very different sort of efficiency–the one found in natural systems, with their coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops.”
(Pollan p. 214)
Michael Pollan follows this with a discussion on how every component of the Salatin farm relies on a system provided by another component. The cows graze on the grass, which is followed by the chickens eating the larvae found in the cow manure, which is followed by the grass feeding of the cow and chicken droppings. This system shows how important the natural complexities and interdependences are for the creation of a naturally efficient farm unaided by the industry standards found in factory farming methods. Pollan also notes that this farm is even more efficient than how it is measured by its products: this system not only produces meat, chicken, and eggs; it also provides its own antibiotics, wormers, parasiticides, and fertilizers. “[By taking] advantage of each species’ natural proclivities,” the Salatin farm creates a system that benefits not only the individual animal but the other species around it as well (Pollan p. 215).
Yes, the farm that Pollan observed does not entirely remove the long food supply chain in the same way that homegrown foods does. Nevertheless, the Salatin style of using the natural synergies that form amongst farm livestock and crops still greatly strengthens the food supply chain’s sustainability. By ending a reliance on a few genetically identical, highly susceptible to pests and infectious disease crops and livestock, the Salatin style of sustainable mass agriculture increases genetic diversity and the overall health of the animals and plants and effectively removes any need for external intervention on these natural systems–aside from Salatin needing to guide the behaviors of his livestock in their daily duties.
Not only does decreasing our food supply chain’s dependencies on unsustainable industrial agricultural practices actually increase our food security, it also provides for the creation of food that is healthier for humanity to consume. As Sir Albert Howard put it:
“A soil teeming with healthy life in the shape of abundant microflora and microfauna, will bear healthy plants, and these, when consumed by animals and man, will confer health on animals and man. But an infertile soil, that is, one lacking sufficient microbial, fungous, and other life, will pass on some form of deficiency to the plant, and such plant, in turn, will pass on some form of deficiency to animals and man.”
(Shiva p. 97)
Sir Howard’s understanding of truly fertile soil almost directly reflects the same sentiment Michael Pollan noticed while at Joe Salatin’s naturally sustainable farm. For example, instead of killing all bacteria with antibiotics in our cattle and creating new and dangerous “super bugs”, humanity would benefit enormously by switching to a system that naturally kills the bad bacteria and supports the good bacteria. Promoting more sustainable food supply channels, we can create food that is healthier for us. Consequently, we will be relatively healthier by eating these foods over factory farmed foods, and this can potentially increase each individual’s ability to fight pathogens such as COVID-19. Not only this, we will create a system that in the long-term costs less and is better for humanity. By reducing our dependence on factory farms and industrial agricultural practices, we consequently increase our food security in the immediate and distant future, and we create a more environmentally sustainable system that is less likely to be devastated by infectious diseases such as COVID-19.
James Tubridy is a Political Science and International Relations double major with a concentration in the Global Political Economy, graduating in August 2020.
Works Cited
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- Pollan, Michael. The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin Books, 2016.
- Shiva, Vandana. Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. North Atlantic Books, 2015.
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