Things are going back to normal but some things have changed forever. What?
That question presents itself to us in every area of our lives as the pandemic wanes and “normal” life resumes.
We’re back to in-person sports, concerts, meetings and gatherings. We can travel again. Shaking hands has returned. People are hugging.
But there’s no question that some things will have changed forever. What those things are is harder to assess. It won’t become clear for months or years what pre-March 2020 elements of our lives are not going to return or have been transformed into something alien to the pre-pandemic world.
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The farming and agriculture worlds are trying to figure this out, like everybody else. At the Manitoba Farm Writers and Broadcasters Association’s annual meeting and gala May 18 (in-person, unmasked and joyful), my province’s agricultural journalists and communications professionals got to hear Barry Prentice of the University of Manitoba take his best shot at summing up the phenomena and trends of the pandemic as they hit the logistics and supply chains of the agriculture and food worlds.
So many unique phenomena arose: the bread-making mania causing flour companies to run out of bags; widespread working-from-home; grocery and meal delivery becoming common sights on residential streets; the restaurant and convention industries collapsing; and sporadic and unpredictable food shortages.
Structural problems appeared: border closures, plant shutdowns and trucker shortages.
Which of these phenomena and trends will steadily retreat and disappear as “normal” returns, and which will become entrenched in a “new normal” of the post-pandemic world?
Prentice gave his guesses at this question, and I’ll try to sum those up in a future story.
For farmers, a major bit of long-term “normal” returned the day Prentice spoke: China reopened its canola pipeline for Canada’s two largest exporters, Richardson and Viterra.
That had nothing to do with pandemic restrictions because Canada’s canola trade with China was throttled back in late 2018 due to the Meng Wanzhou diplomatic dispute, but the sudden break with the pre-Meng situation felt almost the same as the impact of the pandemic on Canadian farmers.
All of a sudden our comfortable assumptions were overturned about China being a safe market for millions of tonnes of annual canola sales and a country with gigantic potential for deeper economic engagement.
A multi-year interregnum occurred, bringing huge costs and dire worries about the future, but things began normalizing during the dispute, and finally the old normal has returned, at least officially.
Today, we can start figuring out what has changed forever. There’s no way Canada will go back to the naïve approach we were embracing in November 2018, when many of us (including me) hoped a deeper economic relationship with China would allow us to reduce our crippling reliance upon the U.S. market.
After China’s communist government seized human hostages, breached trade rules to cause pain to Canadian farmers, and displayed contemptuous treatment toward Canada, nobody with any sense will try to return to the naïve normal.
We can get back to bulk-commodity normal with selling lots and lots of canola and pork to China, and increase our sales of other crops and meats, but we aren’t going to stumble back into fantasies about greater Canada-China economic integration. The new normal will have lots of bulk commodity sales from us, and lots of sales of manufactured parts and finished products from China, but beyond that it’s hard to see what we can safely do.
That’ll take time to clarify.
With the pandemic economy, with the Chinese market, with our lives, we’re returning to some pre-crises normals, but some things have changed forever. About the only thing we can safely say that has changed forever is the future. The future is never going back to the way it was before COVID-19 and before we heard of Meng Wanzhou.
