Canada : Two meat plants hit hard by coronavirus outbreak; 75% of country's beef production closed down
Jai Sen
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Viruses in movement…, Canada in movement…, Food systems in movement…
- Second Alberta meat plant hit hard by coronavirus outbreak (April 27)
- Cargill to close meat-packing plant at centre of Alberta outbreak (April 20)
[This post might seem arcane to some on this list, and perhaps to some even unnecessary, but first, at a material level, what it says is that with this second meat plant closing down, it means the production of “nearly 75 percent” of a country’s (here, Canada) processed beef is now closed…. Three-quarters ! (And as the caption to the photograph below says, that one plant had enough product in it at the time of closing down to produce three million means….)
[And second, though I'm not sure of what proportion beef constitutes in the Canadian diet (though I suspect fairly large), it also shows that ‘local’ – as in national – production, which many of us are now talking about as preferable to global, also doesn’t work; if production is so hugely concentrated. Seventy-five percent of all of one of a country’s major foods produced in just two plants ? Surely, and despite what the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is quoted below as saying, such super concentration is by definition super vulnerable; can such concentration ever be sustainable ?
[And this aside from the extremely rate of infection among workers in these plants that these articles indicate :
The situation at the JBS Canada facility is the second major outbreak at a beef-processing plant in southern Alberta this month. Together with the Cargill Ltd. plant in High River, they are responsible for more than a quarter of the province’s confirmed COVID-19 cases. The two plants produce nearly 75 per cent of the country’s beef.
…………
Cargill Ltd. on Monday said it is temporarily closing its meat-processing plant in High River, Alta. The facility churns out roughly 40 per cent of Western Canada’s processed beef and is a key part of the province’s agriculture industry. Alberta has linked 484 cases of COVID-19 to this plant and dozens more at a competing facility.
The president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture said the closing of the facility is “devastating” for the country’s food system, which is already under strain amid the pandemic. “[The supply chain] normally runs tickety-boo and no one has to think about it,” Mary Robinson said. “These systems are so efficient and so well-run, and as soon as we start mucking around, we’re going to have problems.” [Emphasis given]
[Surely, this news should give us all great pause for thought. It’s not just global vs local; there are other factors involved, too… :
In Canada :
Second Alberta meat plant hit hard by coronavirus outbreak
A novel coronavirus outbreak at a cattle slaughterhouse just outside of Brooks has contributed to a significant jump in COVID-19 cases in the small, southern Alberta city, where one meat-processing worker is confirmed dead from the disease and 3 per cent of the total population are infected.
The situation at the JBS Canada facility is the second major outbreak at a beef-processing plant in southern Alberta this month. Together with the Cargill Ltd. plant in High River, they are responsible for more than a quarter of the province’s confirmed COVID-19 cases. The two plants produce nearly 75 per cent of the country’s beef.
A week ago, Cargill announced that it was temporarily closing its meat-processing plant. JBS has been running at reduced capacity. No one from the company was available for comment on Sunday.
The United Food Commercial Workers Canada union, which says food-processing plants are “battlefields” in the fight against COVID-19, argues that any plant with an outbreak should be closed for two weeks. However, the workers at these plants have been declared an essential part of maintaining Canada’s food supply chain.
Given the scale of the outbreak in Brooks – where there are now almost 500 cases in a community of about 15,000 – Alberta Health Services officials will establish the province’s first drive-through assessment centre specifically for people who are asymptomatic in the city.
“We have a pretty significant outbreak based on our population,” Brooks Mayor Barry Morishita said.
Communities adjacent to meat-packing plants are some of the most vulnerable when it comes to surges in COVID-19 cases. Workers at meat-processing facilities – who labour in close quarters, often doing physically gruelling tasks – have been among the groups hardest hit by the disease.
Alberta has a total of 4,480 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Alberta Health said Sunday that there are a total of 984 cases linked to that Cargill outbreak, including 667 workers. At the JBS facility, located just outside of Brooks in the County of Newell, Alberta Health said 205 workers have been infected. Two workers, one from each plant, have died from COVID-19. A second death in Brooks was a household contact of a worker at the JBS plant.
Brooks is home to 90 per cent of the workers at the JBS facility and the city has seen its COVID-19 numbers rise rapidly in recent days. The province says about half of the cases in Brooks are linked to the JBS outbreak.
Mr. Morishita said he was concerned by what he saw happening in High River, which earlier faced a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases linked to its processing plant. He said he asked Alberta Health officials to establish the assessment centre. The drive-through centre will run in Brooks for three days this week.
Given the high numbers in Brooks, the mayor believes continuing asymptomatic testing will be necessary to gauge the numbers of infected, isolate them and to try to flatten the curve. It’s also in line with the recent arguments by a number of epidemiological experts, who now believe that COVID-19 is far more widespread than official numbers show.
“If we don’t do that, the numbers do have the potential to rise," Mr. Morishita said.
The mayor added that other steps are being taken to deal with the high number of cases, including stepped up enforcement of physical-distancing rules and isolating people infected with or exposed to the coronavirus in hotel rooms.
The plant, which Brazil-based beef-processing giant JBS bought in 2013, has been an economic engine for Brooks for decades. The plant normally has 2,600 workers that can process a million cattle a year, Mr. Morishita said.
The city has seen its ranks bolstered with immigrants from around the world to fill jobs at the plant. Mr. Morishita said 100 languages are spoken in Brooks. Some workers live in cramped rental quarters with people they’re not related to, but changes JBS has made in hiring practices in recent years mean more are now working alongside and living with their families, he added.
“Toronto says they’re the most diverse place on the planet. But if you break it down statistically, we think we are,” the mayor said.
Cargill to close meat-packing plant at centre of Alberta outbreak
Carrie Tait and Kathryn Blaze Baum
April 20 2020
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Cargill said the High River plant, seen here on April 20, 2020, will process about three million meals with products currently in the facility in order to prevent food waste. (Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail)
One of Canada’s largest slaughterhouses is halting operations after hundreds of people connected to the facility were infected with the novel coronavirus and one died from COVID-19, marking the first major shutdown in the country’s food supply chain.
Cargill Ltd. on Monday said it is temporarily closing its meat-processing plant in High River, Alta. The facility churns out roughly 40 per cent of Western Canada’s processed beef and is a key part of the province’s agriculture industry. Alberta has linked 484 cases of COVID-19 to this plant and dozens more at a competing facility.
The president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture said the closing of the facility is “devastating” for the country’s food system, which is already under strain amid the pandemic. “[The supply chain] normally runs tickety-boo and no one has to think about it,” Mary Robinson said. “These systems are so efficient and so well-run, and as soon as we start mucking around, we’re going to have problems.”
The High River plant is one of several slaughterhouses in North America to close or slow its assembly lines because employees, who work elbow to elbow, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Also hit by the pandemic is JBS Canada, one of the largest beef companies in the country. So far, 67 people linked to JBS’s operations in Brooks, Alta., have contracted COVID-19, according to the province. JBS did not return a message seeking comment.
SEE VIDEO AT LINK
Alberta has reported the death of a worker at the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River, as well as two addition deaths at long-term care homes. Health Minister Tyler Shandro says the government plans to bump up salaries, funding and hiring to help care centres deal with outbreaks. The Canadian Press
The idling of the High River facility, even temporarily, threatens to cause ripple effects along the food supply chain, both forward and backward. Consumers might see diminished stock and higher prices at the grocery store, and farmers face the prospect of financial hardship. If producers cannot find a processor to take their animals when they are ready for market, they will incur higher feed and labour costs. Some industry groups warn that a backlog of live animals on farms could also prompt producers to make hard decisions around culling some of their cattle.
Jon Nash, the head of Cargill’s North American protein division, said the company has begun the process of temporarily idling the High River facility. “We are working with farmers and ranchers, our customers and our employees to supply food in this time of crisis and keep markets moving,” he said in a statement.
Cargill, a global agriculture company with headquarters in Minnesota, said the High River plant will process about three million meals with products currently in the facility in order to prevent food waste. The firm did not provide details on how long the closure would last. The facility employs 2,000 people who typically process 4,500 head of cattle each day; many of the labourers are temporary foreign workers and immigrants tied to the city’s Filipino community.
Meat-processing companies have taken measures to create space between workers, including erecting individual stalls in cafeterias, but employees for the most part work in close quarters. The job site, then, is ripe for the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, to spread. The union had been urging Cargill to suspend operations to protect its workers.
“It is about time," said Thomas Hesse, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, noting there were 38 cases of COVID-19 linked to the plant on Easter Sunday.
The head of the Syndicat Agriculture Union, which represents federal food inspectors, said he sent two letters in the past week to federal cabinet ministers asking them to implement consistent protocols across all processing plants that have sick employees. Fabian Murphy said the union wants facilities to immediately shut down for 14 days after an employee tests positive for the virus. He is also advocating for inspectors and workers to be supplied with personal protective equipment. (Inspectors must be on site during slaughter activities.)
“The [Canadian Food Inspection Agency] is leaving it up to the plants to make a determination of whether they can operate safely or not,” Mr. Murphy said. “I don’t think that’s the right call. ... I think the government could have stepped in sooner and taken decisive action.” The CFIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday night.
Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, said carpooling and the coronavirus spreading in households where infected people are unable to isolate from others have played a notable role in the outbreak in High River. Many of the people tied to processing plants with COVID-19 were exposed to the virus before the facilities implemented safety measures, she said.
“We will continue to see new cases linked to this outbreak over the coming days,” Dr. Hinshaw said.
The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, which represents 63,000 beef farms and feedlots, said Cargill was in touch on Monday to communicate that the plant would be shut down for a “short period of time.” Dennis Laycraft, the association’s executive vice-president, said that while he hopes the slaughterhouse will reopen soon, farmers need to prepare for the possibility that the plant could stay closed for weeks. And each week, he said, adds about 25,000 cattle to the backlog on Canadian farms.
“Every part of the industry is being impacted,” he said in a virtual town hall Monday. “We’re reaching out, literally as we speak, to the government to stress the urgency in getting moving on a number of measures we’ve been presenting over the last number of weeks.”
The association is urging Ottawa to implement what is known as a set-aside program, which would allow farmers to keep their livestock longer and feed the animals a forage-heavy maintenance diet instead of the higher-calorie growth diet that typically precedes slaughter. The program would be reminiscent of the one used during the BSE crisis of the early 2000s, when slaughterhouse capacity was down.
Without a set-aside program to slow down the supply chain, producers could be looking at a half-billion dollars in market losses before the end of June, Mr. Laycraft said.
The diminished processing capacity may also become apparent to consumers when they visit their local grocery store. Ms. Robinson said that while there is meat in storage that can be drawn upon in the short term, those inventories will not hold indefinitely. “The storm is not tomorrow,” she said. “The impact of these decisions being made today are going to be felt in the medium and longer term.”
____________________________
Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900)
CURRENT / RECENT publications :
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press. Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN, MOM1Flipkart, and MOM1AUpFront
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?. New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press
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Swaha
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Jai Sen
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Swaha, I personally don’t disagree with you about meat eating. But with all due respect to your point, the issue here – or at least, the point that I was trying to raise – is that with respect to the arguments against globalisation and global sourcing, that we also need to recognise and realise that even more ‘local’ (in this case, within-country) food production systems are unsustainable – and dangerous – because of the vulnerability of the extremely high concentration that has now taken place in relation to food production in relation to actually-existing food practices, at least in this area. (The need to change those practices is another battle, but I don’t think that that can happen by just stopping the supply.)
In the meanwhile, see below : The Trump juggernaut has rolled on – and with no regard at all to what the workers in such plants are saying; to what anybody is saying. His decision here displays the same degree of profound – and dangerous, criminal – ignorance, or a downright denial of realities.
Thanks Peter, for the heads up about the pork plant.
Jai
Trump signs executive order to keep meat-processing plants open
Reuters
Worthington pork plant employees say tight working conditions, non-stop pace made COVID-19 outbreak inevitable
Since the plant opened in 1964, the number of hogs processed in Worthington has increased fourfold, to over 20,000 per day. The plant also employs a greatly-expanded workforce, which is largely foreign-born
Meat Processing Plants Have Become Incubators for Coronavirus. Trump Reportedly Wants to Keep Them Open Anyway.
Trump will reportedly invoke the Defense Production Act to declare the meat-packing plants “critical infrastructure.”
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/radical_ecological_democracy/CAEeGQ_LSvPuzt-9yUbEHspUTYAnGjws%3D4AH5PinwxoNQ0iNj2g%40mail.gmail.com.
Swaha
Ariel Salleh
A few nights back the BBC reported on a corona outbreak among grazing cattle somewhere in the Netherlands. Does anybody know more about this?
Certainly it might entice the world into vegetarianism. Which in turn would be a boon for scarce global water supplies and atmospheric warming …