I’ve been concerned about this for a while. It shows how fragile our infrastructure is. And it’s why proposals like Zeke Emanuel’s to continue it for over a year is societal suicide.
[Update]
Related: The coronavirus is revealing our technology blunders.
Yes. We live in a world where idiot politicians who’ve never even had a job in the real world think they can shut everything down for months and start it up again and nothing bad will happen.
Either that, or they want to starve people. Given some states have banned sales of seeds, I’m starting to lean toward the latter.
The Smithfield plant closures were not because of any government ordered shutdown, but “because so many employees were falling ill.”
Last I read, the company planned to shut it down for a couple of days to clean things, but the state government said it had to be shut down for a couple of weeks, so the company switched to shutting it down ‘indefinitely’.
Reality is, anyone who doesn’t cook pork for long enough to kill Chinese Flu is going to catch some other kind of nasty disease from it anyway. So there’s almost no risk to customers; certainly no risk remotely close to the risk of starving because there’s no food.
According to an article in the Daily Caller, 55% of South Dakota’s confirmed cases are at that plant. The workers need to be separated.
Stalin’s policies in the Ukraine: You, too, can create a famine!
We will not starve. We, in the US, spend about 6% of our gross on food. We could triple, or even quadruple it and survive. We will sacrifice other things when we get hungry. We might not be able to buy what we want, but there will be food. Poorer countries, with no disposable income, will not fare as well.
You can print money.
You can’t print pigs.
A shutdown like this ripples back through the entire supply chain, to the farmers who grow the food that is fed to the pigs, the companies who supply the seed to grow that food and the companies who make the fertilizer to spread in the fields so the food can grow.
So, when you start the plant back up, you suddenly discover there are no pigs to turn into bacon. And no amount of money can buy pigs which don’t exist.
That may not result in people starving in the US, because the government could shut down export of pork to China, and sell it in the US instead. But then you just moved the starvation to China.
(Smithfield is apparently now Chinese-owned and exported over quarter of a million tons of pork to China last year)
I’m not sure why farmers would have to kill all their livestock.
Not all but many as they cannot afford to feed animals that are ready for ‘harvest’.
Almost every county could still be feed itself. Replace grass lawns with Victory Gardens and graze livestock so humans can eat fodder crops. Prioritize milk and eggs over meat. The typical American has enough body fat for a month or two. Everyone can survive.
I rarely say anything like this, but that is simply delusional. I live in a rural area and have a 5.3 acre property. Given several years to set things up, I might be able to grow enough veggies and pork to feed myself. Your plan is a fantasy, at best (or a poorly worded joke). Although I did get a pretty good laugh imagining my computer programmer friends trying to do something like that! There’s a good reason almost all of the hippie communes of yesteryear collapsed immediately.
You may be right. My family used to be in agriculture, and not very successfully, so I know there are more ways to fail than to succeed.
Just for clarification, I wasn’t supposing every household or county could feed itself by pre-industrial methods. Rather that agronomists and nutritionists would be given dictatorial powers, backed by police and National Guard, in order to provide a minimum ration to each citizen. More like the UK during the wars than a hippie homestead.
In actuality I expect humanity will realize things can go on much as they did before. Few seemed to know or care about the hundreds of thousands of people killed every year by influenza. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-estimate.html
My grandfather successfully raised a large flock of chickens, with ten sizeable coops at his peak, and sold eggs, as well as some fryers. It also kept the family fed, alongside his draftsman pay. I caught the tail end of it (he died in the 1970s) and saw it as tedious and unpleasant work. I have a 500sf raised bed garden, a small greenhouse, and a “grow house” (a 6 x 10 dog kennel wrapped in chicken wire on all six sides for things like melons the raccoons will harvest), and I’m thinking of putting in some fruit trees. It’s a lot of work for the amount of food it produces, though the food is many orders of magnitude better than what you get in grocery stores. It keeps me in pickled peppers, anyway.
Because schools aren’t buying food, they will have to ruin the produce they sell to other customers? A lot of schools are still providing meals to kids who qualify for free meals.
What’s happening is that farmers who produce food produce for restaurants don’t have as many customers. In the short term, that means producers can’t move their excess perishable goods. That doesn’t mean that farmers will stop growing crops or plow everything under or that they can’t find a different distribution chain over time.
It is good to be concerned because this virus is impacting all of society, even the parts people don’t think too much about under normal circumstances. It is also a little loopy to claim we are going to run out of food.
It’s every bit as preposterous to think we’ll have food shortages as it is to think we’ll have toilet paper shortages.
/snark
Okay, seriously, the issues are rather similar; differing supply chains between retail and commercial. The sensible way around this is to do like some states are; let people shop at restaurant supply warehouses and other commercial suppliers. However, sensible solutions are very vulnerable to idiot politicians, so I’m skeptical.