...As food purchasing and consumption shifts away from restaurants, hotels, colleges, and other big institutional buyers, lots of product is going to waste. Lack of institutional demand for certain produce has already caused their prices to fall below picking and transportation costs—leading, for example, Florida farmers to just leave squash rotting in the field. For produce that still has markets waiting, closed borders and slowdowns in visa processing are keeping the workforce that harvests them away, unnerving farmers. And workers who are in the fields generally need to work in close proximity to others without proper personal protective equipment, which is unnerving the workers. Businesses are reacting to the new environment by shifting how food is transported and packaged, but that isn't a simple or instant process. Reuters details some of the logistical problems in the dairy industry, which is seeing a grim, for consumers, combination of rising prices and dumping of product...Milk dumping—as much as 7 percent of national output—is already causing water quality worries, even as rationing and price-gauging laws at the retail level prevent the milk market from reaching a workable equilibrium. The nature of getting milk from cows—and of milk itself—means you can't just shut production down for later. The cows keep making milk, and you can't store the product palatably for later consumption. All sorts of systems are facing new strains in the COVID-19 economy. In America, around 70 percent of seafood is consumed outside the home. So seafood producers and processors are reporting near-instant 75–85 percent drops in income. If you run a plant buying potatoes to make French fries for restaurants, you don't want potatoes anymore, because you aren't equipped to package or sell them directly to consumers. Some products, such as eggs, are seeing price rises—even higher than after the 2015 Avian flu scare, which caused 10 percent of America's egg-layers to be culled.And in the new and hard-to-navigate gaps between products and their final consumers, storage costs are zooming. America's food bank system is strained on one side by increased demand, thanks to the sharp increase in unemployment, and on the other side by volunteer and donation shortages, as people isolate and store for their own families' needs...The food industry is also begging the government to relax its trucking regulations, such as weight limits and restrictions on drivers' time on the road, so more people can drive more to get products where they are needed. Drivers themselves are finding it harder to keep themselves provisioned and fed as sit-down restaurants across the nation are shut down. When workers and consumers cannot move freely, the problems caused are international; so are the problems caused by reduced air and sea shipping capacity. To the extent that we import food, those issues will ripple to effect U.S. consumers soon. As Bloomberg reported last week, "port backups that have paralyzed food shipments around the world for weeks aren't getting much better. In fact, in some places, they're getting worse."...MORE
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