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The Global Food Supply Chain is Already Morphing

Given the numerous and complex challenges facing its flow of operation, the global food supply chain has been able to hold up surprisingly well in these last six months of the pandemic. Two key points are vital here, however.

To begin with, it’s weakening at some key pressure points in the delivery and supply system in ways that don’t offer an easy fix. Farm workers in developing regions of the globe, where vast amounts of our food originate, have fallen victim to COVID-19 and the spread among them continues. Transport centres – docks, ports, airstrips, train and road depots – have fallen prey to giant shutdowns as prevention measures are implemented to contain the spread of the virus. Similar problems confront the regional transport centres in the Europe and North America.

And then there is the point researchers and developers have been warning about for decades: the global supply chain is massively wasteful, environmentally threatening, and guilty of poor labour practices, including poor pay. But food gets delivered fairly cheaply to our communities, prompting little thought, or challenge, to getting mass appeal for developing a more sustainable and local alternative.

COVID is now changing all of that and it’s bringing about levels of innovation and collaboration that can be revolutionary should they survive the pandemic era.

We recall the early days of the virus, where consumers hoarded what they could acquire, leaving shelves empty and the on-demand supply in serious jeopardy. While Canada fared moderately well in this area, we all remember the lines at food banks and relief centres from around the world. The strains on grocery stores and markets were enormous. Food is a necessity and essential to our survival, and because of that it places grocery employees in the crosshairs of virus spread.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that such challenges only arrived with the pandemic; in reality, they were already the pressure points of a global food system that was sagging under its own inefficiencies. What COVID has done is brought these issues out into the open and caused many to seek for alternative solutions to the one-size-fits-all practice that has been blindly accepted for decades.

And as a result, practices are slowly changing. We are seeing cooler doors in grocery stores now triggered by foot pedals instead of pulled by handles, thereby limiting physical contact. The flow around some stores is looking more like a traffic grid than the hodgepodge that existed previously, making social distance easier to achieve.  “Everything is on the table for reassessment,” one Loblaws executive told us recently and it remains unsure what the future of grocery stores will entail.  How will they mitigate risk, flow people, keep their food decontaminated, insure the protection of their staffs just as much as their customers? Will they turn more readily to a pick-up model, where customers order their supplies online and then slip through grocery store parking lots to pick up their supplies without ever leaving their cars? This is already being implemented in some locations.

That’s just what’s happening within stores; what’s taking place beyond them is even more pattern-breaking. Delivery of food supplies is going through the roof, including from restaurants. Thousands are purchasing directly from farms in a pattern that avoids excessive social contact but also gets buyers all that much closer to fresh food.

This might appear temporary, but the longer it continues the more it makes sense. It’s not all just about convenience and price, but about safety, food sourcing, the pursuit of local solutions, and the desire to fight climate change along the way. Previously, food was part of a giant system of transportation and convenience; it is now morphing into something more organic, community-minded, safer, more environmentally minded, and, above all, healthier.

What we assumed would be a temporary adaptation to survive a crisis is rapidly on its way to becoming something transformative. We are all understanding more clearly that COVID won’t be our last pandemic – we have already experienced over 20 in the last three decades – and that we can’t just kept altering our lifestyles every few years to adapt in the moment. These new practices aren’t about surviving pandemics but actually stopping them, through better growing, producing, selling and consumption practices.

All this tends to point to a future of systems change. There will be huge effects on the industry and some components may not survive. Consumers will have to think more about how they go about acquiring their food. In the end, however, these changes could put a serious dent in climate change, wasted food, more conscientious citizenry, and governments that develop policies that are better than just bottom-line advantages.  In the next blog, we’ll take a look at what that might look like.

Glen Pearson

Co-Executive Director

London Food Bank

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Thinking Differently About Food

For decades activists for a local fresh food revolution have pressed decision makers, , businesses, marketers and consumers to focus more on the need to look closer to home for food supply chains.  It’s been a tough slog, full of ups and downs, as they have always been in competition with a global supply chain that offered variety, availability and consistency, at the same time as it prompted environmental damage, demeaning wages and monopolized service.

The arrival of the Coronavirus has changed all that, as people begin looking closer to home for their food as a way of fending off the threat of the pandemic. It’s no accident that demand for locally grown food has skyrocketed, nor that the supply of growing amenities like greenhouses are backlogged. It turns out that all those ideas furthered by the “grow and purchase local” movement had serious merit after all and communities are in the process of catching up.

In a time when individuals and families face emerging insecurity about the things that they touch and the food they eat, there is a growing concern about digesting food from thousands of miles away from a grouping of just a few food conglomerates that we don’t really know or see. It’s a valid concern, and despite the reality that the global food supply chain has proved remarkably durable despite the pandemic, customers increasingly look for food that is more natural, fresh and local.

It turns out that we can visualize that transformation by looking at our own communities. In London, Ontario, as an example, local grocery stores are cooperating with City Hall in diverting tens of thousands of pounds of fresh produce each month from the landfills and getting them, still fresh, to the local food bank for distribution to needy families. It’s an environmental measure that has real social consequence.

Farmers and growers in the region are taking part in a federal COVID initiative called the Surplus Food Rescue Program, in part to ensure that more locally grown foodstuffs get into the communities that require them in a time of emergency.

Such measures are urgently required, but there are more long-lasting activities getting new opportunities and exposure that are destined to continue long after the pandemic has receded into the history books. Things like urban gardens, food trees, even a large greenhouse being constructed at the back of the food bank, are signs of things that will endure past COVID.

The transformation of the farming industry in recent decades has led to the closing of thousands of farms in the global race for the bottom line. That has left some growers and producers well-positioned to take advantage of such monopolies but the majority of farmers have openly expressed their desire to get back to the practice of supplying the communities around them and being part of healthy living as opposed to just cheap goods. And they do have an advantage on their side at present, as this pandemic has proved the point that local has better stability, knowledge and nutrition advantages over the current global supply and can easily endure in all conditions and not just pandemics.

In almost every sector of Canadian communities there is continually voiced the theme of “building back better.”  Nowhere is this more valid than in the food industry. In every facet of food supply – grain, produce, fisheries, agriculture, to name a few – there are new incentives to get more local food into stores, markets and homes. At a time when global consumption is under scrutiny, the prospect of healthy farms and healthy food is just the ticket millions of Canadians are looking for.

But within all this positive movement lies an abiding threat. While it’s all beneficial, municipalities and communities aren’t effectively resourcing the infrastructure necessary for the long-term health of the local food supply chain. For the sake of future food security, investments must be made in enhancing local food markets, more efficient water management, needed environmental adaptation, clearer education for the benefits of locally grown foodstuffs, the effective redirection of local food from the global chain to the community where it is grown, and the overall design to turn our communities into food-secure areas. No COVID-19 recovery plan designed by any community can be truly effective without such measures.

The great threat is if we just lazily recede back into the spending patterns and growing practices of life before the pandemic. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now or in the future. Communities are moving in the local food direction because it makes sense and not just because it secures us in a time of pandemic. We need to build food and ecosystem resiliency and this pandemic has perhaps given us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finally get to what we should have been doing all along.

The next few blogs will look further into this challenge each day, but for now we should all be looking for food systems change and not just for an emergency plan to get us through some difficult days.

Glen Pearson

Co-Executive Director

London Food Bank