In Our View: Precautions required for food supply chain

Among its many impacts, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed weaknesses in the nation’s food supply chain. President Donald Trump last week issued an executive order recognizing that meat-packing plants are essential, but those plants cannot operate if workers are too ill to show up.

Ensuring that meat, chicken and pork products will continue to fill grocery store shelves will require long-term investment by the industry. Allowing for social distancing, providing protective gear and routinely testing employees will be necessary for the security of America’s meat-producing companies.

The need for change is evident even in Washington, where meat packing is a small sector of the economy compared with many states in the center of the country. At a Tyson plant in Wallula (Walla Walla County), 250 workers have tested positive for COVID-19, with hundreds of tests pending. The plant has been closed for testing, and officials said it will reopen when there are enough available workers.

Outbreaks also have been reported at a Foster Farms plant in Kelso and a Washington Beef plant in Toppenish.

Food-processing plants, indeed, can be deemed essential. We have seen the chaos created by perceived shortages in toilet paper; we shudder to imagine the discord if grocery stores are unable to maintain food stocks.

Trump has used the Defense Production Act to compel meat-processing plants to remain open and, he said, absolve them of liability concerns. But, as Stephen Meyer, an economist who works with the pork industry, said: “I don’t see it having much effect. You can tell anybody to open a plant, but if the workers don’t show up, it doesn’t work.” A study released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 4,900 workers in meat and poultry facilities have tested positive for coronavirus, and at least 20 have died.

Meanwhile, shutdowns at processing plants have had a ripple effect. According to Jayson Lusk, an economist with Purdue University, farmers are suffering from a bottleneck in livestock processing. He explains in a blog post that the nation has the capacity to process about 500,000 hogs a day; with roughly 40 percent of the pork producing capacity shut down, there are 200,000 excess hogs on farms every day — or about 1 million every five days. “If the finished pigs, who weigh 280 lbs., are unable to head to the packing plant,” Lusk writes, “there is no room in the barn to receive the new batch of pigs from the nursery.”

The alternative often is euthanasia. A representative for the Minnesota Pork Producers, in one example, estimates that 60,000 to 80,000 hogs will be put down in that state this week rather than being processed into food. In another example, a poultry processor in Maryland and Delaware announced it will euthanize 2 million chickens.

All of that starts with food-packing plants being unable to function at normal capacity when workers fall ill. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration in March issued guidelines for employers to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but did not issue specific guidelines for meatpackers until late April. Among them: Creating assessment and control protocols; staggering work shifts and break times; installing physical barriers between workers; and ensuring adequate ventilation and hand-washing stations.

Those precautions should have been instituted at the start of the coronavirus breakout, and the federal government must ensure that they are taken now. The nation’s food-supply chain depends on them.