Today, Explained - Overflowing farms, desperate food banks

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

American farmers are destroying their crops while demand is mounting at food banks. Politico food and agriculture reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich explains. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Wednesday, April 29th, 2020, and the FDA is ready to approve a treatment. I'm Sean Ramos-Furman. This is your coronavirus update from Today Explained. The Food and Drug Administration is planning to announce remdesivir as an emergency COVID-19 treatment. A hot-off-the-press study says that it's sped up the recovery time of patients with the virus. The Brad Pitt of infectious disease doctors, Anthony Fauci, cautioned that the study still needs to be peer reviewed, but he sounded optimistic. President Trump was also optimistic, but it was just last week he sounded optimistic about household disinfectants. So please temper your expectations, people. Just a reminder that remdesivir is not a vaccine. It doesn't prevent COVID-19.

It's a treatment for people who have COVID-19. A vaccine still looks a ways away, but good news is good news, right? And it looks like it couldn't come a moment too soon. In the first quarter of 2020, the United States economy contracted by nearly 5%. That's the most since the financial crisis of 2008. Half the country says that someone in their household has either lost a job or has had their hours reduced because of this coronavirus. According to a new Marist poll, that same survey found that an overwhelming number of Americans do not think schools, restaurants, or sports should

be coming back until we have more testing. The governor of Texas said on Monday that movie theaters would be able to open as soon as this Friday. According to the LA Times, the owner of the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse theater chain said thanks but no thanks. The company wants more time to create new procedures that will keep employees and guests safe. You can, of course, support your favorite movie theaters by buying gift cards, and you can support the movies themselves by paying to stream them. The Academy Awards just changed its rules because of the pandemic. For the first time ever, movies that had theatrical release dates

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. About a month and a half ago, when this pandemic was just starting to heat up in the United States, we reached out to all of our listeners and said, let us know what your questions are. And many of you got back in touch and said, what's up with the nation's food supply? This thing that we never have to worry about, this thing that the government handles for us. But all of a sudden, you know, you were worried about. So we reached out to people in the know and they said, don't worry about it. The nation's food supply is fine. But a month and a half in now, we have a better idea of what this pandemic is doing to the

nation's food. And while there still might be enough food, what we know is that farmers have way too much of it, food banks don't have nearly enough, and food workers are getting sick. Halina Badamiller-Ivic has been covering all the angles for Politico. You know, I think we're seeing an unprecedented level of disruption. I mean, there is plenty of food.

We live in a nation of plenty. We have plenty of calories. We live in a nation of plenty. We have plenty of calories. We have plenty to eat in this country. But the distribution of food right now is so fundamentally shaken by all of the sudden Americans really not eating in restaurants, not eating on cruise ships, not eating in cafeterias. And the supply chain is really struggling to adapt. And that's why we're seeing really, I think, waste at an unprecedented scale. We're seeing crops being destroyed.

So far, we've lost over 4 million pounds of green beans, over 5 million pounds of cabbage. And I have a farmer friend that left 10 million pounds of tomatoes. We're seeing milk being dumped. It's such a waste and it's such a trauma for the dairy farmer that has worked so hard. You know, meat processing plants are going down. Now, the plant that supplies 5% of our nation's entire pork supply is closed indefinitely. And today, Smithfield announced two more closures, joining other companies taking similar measures.

We've really not seen anything like this in our lifetimes. So the issue here isn't about whether or not people want the food. It's more that we can't get that food from point A to point B. So I think cabbage is a really good example. I just did a story that featured a farmer that was, we call it disking, right? So they're grinding their crop into the ground. That's what they call it. I disked this crop into the ground. He was disking hundreds of acres of cabbage into his fields. And you think, why? Like, why can't we just sell all that cabbage at the

grocery store? Well, that cabbage is generally used for the coleslaw at restaurant chains like KFC. So are Americans going to eat just as much cabbage as they would if they were going to KFC and getting fried chicken and getting their side of cabbage? No, they're not. Like the demand of cabbage is fundamentally different in a world in which you're not going to places like KFC. So it's just a complete reordering of the food supply. It's not that we're necessarily consuming less. It's that we're consuming different foods. All of a sudden, we're going and we're buying pasta and canned foods at a level that we were not before this pandemic.

So you're seeing certain products get cleared out of grocery stores. But actually, there's plenty of produce in most grocery stores, and that is largely because of this big disruption. Some of the produce can get redirected to retail, but the volumes are just so incredible that we don't have a system set up to redistribute it. But it isn't just cabbage, right? I mean, I've been reading about milk and eggs, even though when I go to the grocery store, it seems like milk and eggs are often the first things that they're sold out of after toilet paper. So why are dairy farmers having issues right now? It's incredibly tragic in some ways because dairy farmers have struggled with low prices for so long. You know, so many

have gone out of business and now we're in a situation where people are demanding milk at the grocery store. And like you said, you go and they're either limited how much you can buy or they're out. And meanwhile, they're dumping. I think a really good way to wrap your head around what's happening is to think about school meals. So I think about 7% of all the fluid milk in the country usually goes to school lunches and breakfasts.

So they're in those little cartons. And so if all this milk is going into those little cartons every day for millions of school children, and all of a sudden you disrupt that, or maybe the kids are taking more of another type of food and not as much milk, you then have these plants that are used to producing for these very specific food service cartons. All of a a sudden they don't have gallon containers. They don't have their whole production line set up to do that. So it's really hard to just flip that switch to all of a sudden have all the processing you need to fulfill that demand

and make it all work. And I think we're really seeing that there's a lot of places in the food supply that are pretty inflexible. I mean, there is plenty of milk. And the fact that you would have outages at the grocery store, it's just mind-boggling. So what do you do with all that milk? I mean, they're dumping it on fields and manure lagoons. If a cheese plant isn't able to process all of the raw milk in their area, I mean, they really don't have a choice. Maybe all their tanks are full. They can't store it. It's incredibly tragic. And I can tell

you right now, dairy farmers hate the idea of dumping milk. They work so hard day in and day out to produce that. They're very proud of what they do. It's one of the things that's really, really tough on farmers of all kinds. They do not like to see the fruits of their labor wasted like this. And the same is happening for eggs. Yeah. So eggs, you know, if you're a plant that mostly processes liquid eggs for food service, like think about when you go to a hotel and you see those big trays of scrambled eggs,

you know, those usually come from liquid eggs. They come from these, they're called breaker facilities. So that facility is not set up to just package eggs in cartons that we're used to buying and reconfiguring everything it does overnight. I actually read the other day, I guess there is actually a shortage of egg cartons for packing eggs. So the logistics of all this are truly complex. And I think we're really seeing, again, the limits of how nimble this food supply can be in a crisis like this. And so beyond dairy and vegetables, what's up with meat? I mean, I don't know if everyone saw this story, but there was certainly this article circulating around that suggested that the nation has a huge surplus

of chicken wings because March Madness didn't happen and a lot of chicken wings were ready to go for all of the bars and restaurants where people would be watching basketball. Is that true? You know, I'm not sure exactly about chicken wings, but think about it again in terms of how consumption's changing, right? So people might be going to the store and buying chicken breasts, which are easier to prepare at home, but most people are not going to consume as many chicken wings if someone else is not preparing them for them. So I would not be surprised at all if that were the case. We just shifted our consumption so quickly. There really isn't another time in history where you could point to the entire country changing its consumption

on a dime. We throw around the word unprecedented a lot, but it really is unprecedented. The meat system is really showing, I think, some of the consequences also of concentration. So it has become increasingly concentrated with a few companies processing a large section or large percentage of the pork, beef, and chicken supply. And so when you have these very high volume meat plants, they're extremely efficient. They've probably brought the cost of meat down. But if something goes wrong, say a coronavirus outbreak among its workers, that is incredibly disruptive. I mean, we've seen one Smithfield plant go down that took out 5% of the pork processing capacity. And I think pork processing right now, because of coronavirus outbreaks, is down somewhere between a fifth or a quarter of all pork processing is down. I mean, that's an incredible amount of disruption to the meat supply. And we do have meat, you know, we have pretty big frozen stores of meat in this

country, but a lot of economists are starting to predict that, you know, the meat shortages could very well be around the corner because this is so disruptive. And of course, the president invoked the Defense Production Act yesterday and just signed this executive order saying that meat packing plants are critical infrastructure and they should remain open. Is the president concerned about the safety of the people who work in these plants? I think unions and worker advocacy groups think not, right? They are very concerned about what this executive order will mean for the workers on the front lines of these meat processing plants. I mean, these are already physically demanding, grueling jobs. They are already thankless. And many of these workers are afraid

to go to work because they're working in very close quarters. I mean, they can be just a few feet away from each other, shoulder to shoulder. It's very easy for you to process meat in that way. It's very difficult for you to practice social distancing in a meat plant. So there is a lot of criticism about the executive order. You know, The president and his supporters certainly feel that this is critical infrastructure. And the sad part about when you close meat plants, it's not like all the animals can just wait. This whole system is built around keeping animals flowing through the processing line. So when you close a meat plant, the pigs that let's say are going to go get processed, they're the right size. You cannot just wait for weeks and weeks and keep

feeding them. It's expensive. They'll get too big. There's just a million reasons why you can't do that. And all of the small pigs you're raising, the piglets, the whole system then gets backed up all the way through. And so that's why you now have farmers looking at having to euthanize potentially hundreds of thousands of animals because they can't process them on time. So it's this really efficient system we have, like it's efficient in terms of we have very inexpensive meat in this country, but I think we're starting to see, again, the vulnerabilities in the system. And workers are really at the front lines of that because without them, you can't keep these plants

operating. So you have this tension, I think, unfairly between, you know, keeping the lines open for meat processing and the humans at the front of that who make it possible. And I guess in addition to the tragedy that is workers in these plants are dying, are getting COVID-19, are getting sick, is the tragedy that potentially we're going to be euthanizing animals, we're dumping milk, we're breaking eggs, we're burying onions and destroying disking cabbage when there are lines wrapping around food banks and grocery stores that are giving away free food across the country. Yeah, I think the disconnect is stunning. To see, you know, some of these lines for food banks banks people wait in their cars for hours good thing gas is cheap right now honestly like people are having to line up for miles in some cases there's incredible

aerial footage from i think it's san antonio of 10 000 cars waiting to get food nobody likes it when your kids ask what's for dinner and you're not sure what to tell them. It's not easy to ask for help. And we try to provide for our own family. And a huge portion of those people are newly unemployed. They've never been to a food bank. So we're seeing, I think, a stress on that system. It's heartbreaking to watch. I think it's heartbreaking for food banks. It's heartbreaking for the people who are waiting in those lines. It's heartbreaking for farmers. And what it seems like we're lacking is a real sense of urgency and leadership and creativity to work on this problem. More with Helena after a quick break. card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your

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The president is clearly concerned about the nation's supply of meat, but that's just one part of a growing problem. It doesn't appear he's managing very well. I think everyone agrees there's a lot more that the government could be doing and could have done a lot more quickly. One of the things on the meat plant side is they could have been more aggressive about issuing guidance or even mandating some of these safety protocols in these plants.

I mean, we already have federal meat inspectors in all of these plants to do food safety. You know, could they have been leveraged immediately to try to do more social distancing and sanitation and hand washing between workers? I mean, you know, there are many things that could have been done more quickly. On the food bank side, USDA could be relaxing a lot of its red tape around purchasing food and moving it more quickly. You know, when you have food that is only going to last a short amount of time, produce, you know, milk, depending on how pasteurized it is, you know, they don't last forever. They need to move quickly. What are some of the other creative things we could be doing? There's actually a bill I saw, I think it just dropped last night, to try to expand food stamp benefits so that people

could use them at restaurants, maybe temporarily. Interestingly, actually, in Washington, D.C., I'm buying a lot of my groceries from a restaurant because they have no shortages of eggs. They have no shortages of toilet paper because those supply chains are still fully intact. What is the USDA doing? So right now they are trying to set up a fresh box program, which is going to spend $100 million a month on produce, $100 million a month on dairy, $100 million a month on some meat products. And it's going to put together these mixed boxes of perishable and also pre-cooked meat items. And they're going to get them to food banks.

The earliest those are going to start shipping to food banks is May 15th. So one of the things I pointed out in my story is that is two months from when this first disruption happened at a national scale. So not super quick. There's also a lot of concern that it's not big enough. I mean, $100 million a month for produce, for example. They estimate the produce industry is missing out on a billion dollars a week. The California industry estimates they're going to be losing more than a billion dollars a month. So they all are glad USDA is going to buy a hundred million dollars of produce. But again, it just puts it into perspective of how big the disruption and the loss is. Right now, there are farmers in California

that are turning romaine lettuce into their soil. They don't have anywhere to sell it. And again, with this increase in unemployment and these demand on food banks, the fact that we're still wasting so much fresh food, it's just gut-wrenching on every level. That one just seems so obvious. Like romaine lettuce, people would eat that lettuce if you just put it on a truck and drove it to a food bank. Did no one think of a way to do that? This is America. Yeah, I know. In California, they do have a system set up at the state level to connect, you know, surplus

produce with state food banks. But you have to realize that California is supplying the whole country with fruits and vegetables. That means that it's very difficult for your local food banks to absorb that kind of scale, which I think, again, points to the need for having a really strong federal response to this because the distribution is at such a scale that you can't just fix it locally. There's just too much lettuce for the you know, the food banks in California to absorb. You would really need to be connecting the dots across the country.

So does this come down on USDA and the Trump administration for not connecting the dots sooner? I think there's a lot of criticism directed at them for not moving more quickly. You know, I think a free market purist would say, you know, the market's going to fix this. And in some ways, they are right in that the market will fix this. It will destroy enough supply to stabilize prices. But I think the question is, at what cost? Beyond what the USDA is proposing now, are there ideas that farmers and who knows, the people who are running food banks want them to consider that they're not? Everyone wants them to think bigger, right? They want them to spend more. They want them to be more aggressive. They want them to move more quickly.

But there are some other interesting ideas I think USDA is not considering and really hasn't been creative in thinking outside the box. One interesting idea that did not make my story came from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. He served under the Obama administration and he said, you know, why don't we use stadiums? They have all this unused cold storage where they would normally be, you know, storing the food for concessions. You know, can't we move some of this surplus of perishable food to places like that and have people come pick up? You know, they have massive parking lots. Could we get volunteers? Like, there are probably other ways to connect the dots between, you know, this massive surplus

and the need that we are not even working on. Do you think farmers will be made whole eventually by the USDA? I mean, they already receive a lot of federal aid. Is it going to take years for them to be made whole after this crisis? They've already received billions of dollars to respond to retaliatory tariffs and other disruptions from the trade wars that we've been engaged in. So there's already stress on a lot of these commodities. And then going into this, we are slated to spend about $3 billion on food buys over the next several months and $16 billion on direct payments. And almost everyone agrees it's not nearly enough to compensate the losses that are going to be felt across producers. So

the direct payments are capped at $250,000 per entity, but it is really expensive to grow these crops. So if you are growing strawberries, you might be spending $30,000 an acre just to get those strawberries all the way to being ripe. It's $4,000 an acre to grow cabbage. It's $10,000 an acre to grow tomatoes. So if you're going to lose millions of dollars on this season because of this massive disruption, and then you're going to get a $250,000 check from USDA, that is a welcome help, but it is not anywhere near making you whole. And that is just a brutal place to be as an industry. And I don't think anyone thinks USDA is going to be able to make everyone whole from this. And in the meantime, what about all the people who are hungry, who are worried about how they're going to plan their next week of meals for their families. What do people most need in the meantime? Well,

farmers are destroying their crops and the Trump administration and the USDA are just playing catch up. I think anything you can do to support your food banks, you know, they would say it is more is welcome, whether it's donations or food you have in your pantry. The other thing food banks actually really need right now is volunteers because food bank volunteers tend to be, they trend older and those are the exact people that, you know, are being told to stay home. I think the tragic news on the food waste front is that's going to continue for some time. The problem really, I think, is systemic though. So these really big food system problems are going to have to be addressed at a larger scale than, you know, individuals supporting their food banks.

Hopefully more states will step up, more leaders will step up to have creative solutions because I think it's going to take an all hands on deck approach. Helena Bademiller-Ivic writes about food and agriculture for Politico, where you can find all of her great reporting on this crisis. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.