Specialized supply chains where producers have only one outlet can cause significant problems when chain is disrupted
John Kowalchuk was worried about the most important farm labour he’s got: his own family.
Because harvest demanded 100 percent of everybody’s available time, he fretted about what would happen if he or another family member went down with COVID-19.
“You can lose two weeks (if you get infected) and during the busy season two weeks is a lifetime,” said Kowalchuk, a central Alberta farmer.
“My daughter did get COVID, back this summer, so it hit close to home,” said Kowalchuk, who was taking part in Bayer’s Future of Farming series.
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With more than half a year of pandemic experience behind the farming and food industries, participants are able to look back and see what worked and what didn’t, what has been a problem and what has gone well.
That experience has taught people throughout agriculture a lot about the industry’s complex supply chains, as well as new ways to view sustainability.
“It has shown how complex and fragile our global food system is,” said Dirk Backhaus, head of product supply for Bayer’s crop science division.
“It was a tremendous effort to make sure our operation kept going.”
Around the planet the pandemic shock affected farmers and the food system differently, as each country felt a different impact.
In some, the food industry is a tightly woven fabric of great complexity, creating challenges when borders close and certain threads become unavailable.
In others, farmers are poor and operate without much of a safety net, so if they can’t produce or sell a crop they don’t have enough money to buy food for their own families.
COVID-19 has highlighted existing shortcomings in the food system in a dramatic manner never seen before.
“Even before this pandemic our food system was not functioning too well,” said Heike Axmann, a supply chain expert with Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
“Many of our food supply chains are very specialized. They only have one outlet… (Some) couldn’t find any other outlets (during the first months of the pandemic.) Food loss and waste increased due to that.”
Access to labour, inputs and money have become key restrictions at times, hampering farmers’ abilities to produce food and support themselves.
“Prices are likely to increase and production to decrease,” said Axmann.
The connection of other industries to food has also become clear during the pandemic, said Manuel Otero, director-general of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture.
In Latin America, food exports increased after the beginning of the pandemic. But in the Caribbean, many working in the tourism industry saw their incomes collapse and their ability to buy food disappear.
Kowalchuk said farmer vulnerability became clear to him as the disease spread and supply chains became interrupted. Sustainability became a real concept when access to labour and inputs stopped being taken for granted. He changed how he did business.
“Buying locally is important. Sourcing locally. It helps to reduce your risk to other areas and other communities that have COVID,” said Kowalchuk, who tried to keep all of his farm’s interactions to suppliers and customers within 80 kilometres of his farm.
“It’s such a big thing. It saves us from travelling. In a way it’s forced us to be more sustainable, which isn’t a bad thing. We have to learn from that.”
Otero said food security begins with ensuring that farmers can keep operating.
“We have to take care of farmers. Farmers have to be considered key actors,” said Otero.
