The Fragility of the Food Chain
"We currently have 36 JBS employees who have tested positive in Weld County and we are offering support to our team members and their families."Andre Nogueira, chief executive, JBS USA"There are some 14 people hospitalized.""Maybe 200 to 300 of the workforce have been impacted."U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence"We're looking at this graph where everything's looking beautiful and is coming down and then you've got this one spike.""I said, 'What happened to Denver?' And many people, very quickly.""By the way, they were on it like so fast, you wouldn't believe it. This just happened. I just saw it this morning.""So we'll be looking at that. We don't want cases like that happening."U.S. President Donald Trump
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| Security wear face mask at JBS USA meat packing plant, where two members of the staff have died of coronavirus disease in Greeley, Colorado. |
The American vice-president has urged food processing workers to "show up and do your job", as "vital" workers, whose focus is to keep the country's population fed. Yet, as the hardest-hit COVID-19 nation in the world at this juncture, food plants across the country are beginning a reduction of output, or sitting idle as novel coronavirus cases continue spreading from cities to rural America.
The nation has seen outbreaks in factories in recent weeks, leading to hundreds of workers being sent home to self-isolate. In some areas, workers have staged walkouts in protest of working conditions. Stations on processing lines in meat plants leave no room for distancing. The challenge of maintaining a distance from one another is exacerbated by the workplace infrastructure where workers share break rooms and locker-rooms.
Now, comes news that the largest to date outbreak of COVID-19 is taking place at a major American food facility. As the world's biggest meat company, JBS SA Wednesday confirmed that a worker from its Weld County facility in Greeley, Colorado, had died from COVID-19-associated complications. No sooner was that news made public, than the ABC 7 Denver news channel reported a second employee death in Greeley, also attributed to the virus.
The company also acknowledged "increased absenteeism" at its beef production facility in Greeley. In response, it is working with the federal government, with the governor of Colorado and a senator to ensure that COVID-19 tests are to be carried out for all Greeley plant employees. This situation reveals the vulnerability of the global supply chains needed to ensure that grocery stores are stocked following the panic buying of the early days of the global pandemic.
"It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running.""The closure of this facility [Sioux Falls, South Dakota], combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.""These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation's livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals."Smithfield Foods CEO Kenneth Sullivan
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A Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., that
produces 4% to 5% of the nation's pork supply has become the latest meat
processing facility to shut down as COVID-19 sickens plant workers.
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Labels: Closures, Employees, Global Food Chain, Novel Coronavirus, United States
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, April 14, 2020
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