Risk and Resilience

Companies like Tyson and Smithfield Foods warn of a "breaking" supply chain "perilously close to the edge", but experts say there's plenty of meat.

The viral infection (COVID-19) and subsequent closures are straining the supply of meat to market. Beef production is down 25% and pork has declined 15% from a year ago, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Why shoppers don’t need to panic-buy at the supermarket.... As the pandemic began, Americans lined up by the hundreds to panic buy staples like 20-pound bags of rice and peanut butter at Costco. Shelf-stable, freeze-dried provisions normally marketed to campers and doomsday survivalists flew off the shelves at outdoor companies.

Despite Smithfield Foods' dire warning, MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi says the Sioux Falls closure is "not a big deal for the supply chain."

As we struggle to come to terms with the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most frustrating sights is witnessing front-line health-care workers begging for more masks, protective gowns, testing kits, ventilators and intensive-care beds...The woeful performance of these health-care supply chains raises the question of how such glaring shortages happened. And just as important: How do we ensure that this doesn’t happen again?

The pandemic has left numerous supply chains across multiple sectors significantly disrupted. Many organizations have been left with no other option but to shut down plants because the supply of materials has dried up. This is a result of limitations in supplier or transportation capacity, or due to the mandatory lockdowns that are now in place in many countries around the world.

One of the largest farmworker unions in the US says early polling of farm laborers suggests operators of some of the nation’s largest fresh produce farms aren’t taking steps to protect fieldworkers from the spread of Covid-19. 

MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi speaks with Bloomberg's Scarlet Fu and Romaine Bostick on the collapse of the food supply chain from the coronavirus (Source: Bloomberg)

Fear of lawsuits and red tape are keeping them out of the hands of American frontline medical workers.

From the U.S. perspective, it depends what those goods are, according to MIT supply chain expert Yossi Sheffi. While nothing is certain, the availability of food is less of a concern in the U.S., in supply-chain terms, while access to medical supplies is a much more problematic issue.