World’s Largest Fresh Tuna Market In Japan Takes A Nosedive
As restaurants remain fully or partially closed, demand for sushi has plummeted, and the world’s largest tuna market in Tokyo is feeling the pinch. Fresh fish prices decreased 1.5% in the past year, according to government data, but fresh tuna prices dropped even further by 8.4%. “Our sales are down by 60% compared to last August,” said Yasuyuki Shimahara, owner of a Tokyo izakaya bar that specializes in tuna dishes. Tuna imports also fell 18% in the first six months of 2020 compared to the year before, according to finance ministry data.
Food Supply Chains Tighten And World Hunger Worsens
Food banks are trying to keep up with increasing numbers of hungry families around the world, but food distribution during lockdown has created additional challenges. Since the pandemic began, the European Food Banks Federation (FEBA) saw an average 50% jump in food demand from charities. While a large fast-food chain offered the group leftover ingredients, FEBA had difficulty visiting the chain’s thousands of locations to gather the food. FEBA has also had a shortage of volunteers during lockdown.
In the U.S., food banks have struggled to keep up with demand from lines of cars hoping to feed their families. A food bank in Memphis served more than 18,000 people between March and August, 10 times more than it served at the same time last year. According to a government survey, during one week in late July, close to 30 million Americans reported they did not have enough to eat. Lauren Bauer, a food insecurity researcher at the Brookings Institution, says that one in three households with children reported insufficient food supplies for daily needs. Feeding America, which oversees the country’s largest supply chain of food banks and pantries, projects that as many as 54 million Americans could become food insecure before the year’s end, marking a 46% increase since the start of the pandemic. Feeding America has reported a 60% increase in people they serve, and says that four in 10 people are new recipients of food aid.
Starbucks Institutes Supply Chain Transparency For Coffee Farmers And Consumers
Bags of Starbucks coffee at its US stores now include a code allowing consumers to determine where the beans came from, where they were roasted, and advice on brewing, according to Michelle Burns, Starbucks senior vice president of global coffee, tea and cocoa. Coffee farmers also have access to a reverse code allowing them to track what happens to the coffee they grew. The code is part of tool by Microsoft Corp. that uses blockchain technology and allows Starbucks to share traceability data with its customers concerned about fair trade and sustainability issues in the coffee market. Starbucks isn’t the only company offering transparency in its supply chain. Coffee roasters such as J.M. Smucker Co. and Jacobs Douwe Egberts joined a blockchain initiative last year in a partnership with IBM and the startup Farmer Connect, which helps the firms track the origin and pricing of their beans along the supply chain. For Starbucks, bags with blended coffees will be traced to the country of origin, while single origin beans will be traced to the region where the beans were grown or to the farm itself. Farmers will have access to the same tool so they can trace what happens to their beans when they leave the farm.
New York Sues One Of The Nation’s Largest Egg Producers For Pandemic Price Gouging
Last week, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Hillandale Farms, accusing the egg producer of charging consumers excessive prices for eggs during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to James’s investigation, the company increased egg prices by nearly five times in March. In mid-January, Hillandale charged New York City supermarket chain Western Beef $0.59 for a dozen large white eggs. By the end of March, when New York City was scrambling to contain the virus, Hillandale charged $2.93 a dozen. At Stop & Shop, Hillandale’s price for jumbo white eggs doubled from January’s $0.85 to $1.70 a dozen by mid-March, then it nearly quadrupled by early May to $3.16 a dozen. James argues that the prices violate New York State law forbidding price gouging, which the state defines as “charging grossly excessive prices for essential goods and services” during “extraordinary adverse circumstances.”
Beef And Pork Prices Rose More Than 20% Since February
With restaurants and event venues closed, demand for meat has skyrocketed in grocery stores. Prices have shot up as well. Overall, Americans spent 4.5% more on groceries in June than they did in February. The price of doughnuts, coffee cakes, and other sweet baked goods increased 4.2%, while shelf stable seafood prices rose 4.6%. The cost of peanut butter went up 7.9%, and ham prices increased 8.7%. As for meat, fresh pork prices rose 19.9% and beef and veal prices increased by 22.2% and counting, according to market analysts 24/7 Wall St. and data from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rising food prices have largely been pinned on supply chain issues as demand for retail products grew dramatically when nationwide lockdowns began. Economic troubles among farmers and closures at meatpacking facilities have also hampered supply of some products.
U.S. Beef Industry Begins Adapting To Become More Sustainable
Between high prices, more vocal vegans, virus outbreaks at slaughterhouses, and the impact of conventional beef production on climate change, American beef has come under fire lately. Leaders in the U.S. beef industry are adapting to meet shifting consumer demands. Here’s how the U.S. beef industry is changing from the ranch to the butcher case to become more sustainable over the long haul.
Not all American beef comes from feedlots. Small ranches such as White Oak Pastures and Roam Ranch are using regenerative agriculture techniques to produce grass-fed beef and bison with a lower carbon footprint than conventional feedlot beef. Even on the huge feedlots, efficiencies and economies of scale are conserving resources more than ever before. About 50% of the corn fed to feedlot cattle comes from waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Yes, the animals are given hormones and steroids, but because that causes them to grow faster, the cattle consume 15 to 20% less feed, reducing the total acreage of corn that needs to be grown for feed. Corn-fed cattle reach slaughter weight about 13 months sooner than grass-finished cattle, which also means that a corn-fed steer produces less methane over the course of its life than a grass-finished steer. And every pound of American feedlot beef results in three times fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a pound of beef produced in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa due to inefficiencies in the beef production systems of those countries. The Big Four meatpackers (Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef) produce about 80% of American beef, but smaller regional slaughterhouses are now beginning to chip away at that percentage. As a result of the pandemic, supply chain challenges and shifting consumer buying habits have caused a boom in small, regional slaughterhouses, which may ultimately help to decentralize the meatpacking industry and shield it against future supply chain bottlenecks. Finally, grass-finished beef is improving in quality and the number of producers is increasing, creating better and more widespread alternatives to traditional corn-fed beef. .
Food Shortages? Soaring Prices? Economist Stats Say Otherwise
Catherine Kling, an economics professor at Cornell University, said “I’ll bet I’ve been to 50 talks in the last five, 10 years where the beginning is, ‘We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This is a crisis situation.’ The word ‘crisis’ gets used regularly.” But the numbers tell a different story. Tom Hertel, an economist at Purdue University, says it’s true that from 1900 to 2000, the number of people on earth grew four times in size; however, by the end of the century, food prices has dropped by one-third. On the whole, food has been getting cheaper and cheaper around the world. Hertel and Kling claim that poverty, war and political oppression are what make people go hungry, not food shortages. So why do forecasters and lawmakers keep harping about potential food shortages? “Part of the reason may be it’s an effective communication device,” says Kling. She says that farmers and lobbyists may claim the world needs more food so that governments don’t enforce environmental regulations that may reduce overall farm output. Hertel asserts that scientists too have a reason to exaggerate or overstate food shortage risks: it helps raise money for agricultural research. “The issue is not, can we produce enough food,” says Hertel, “It is, can we produce enough food in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment.”
How the Pandemic May Strengthen the U.S. Food System
The pandemic has exposed several weaknesses in the U.S. food supply chain. When restaurants, stadiums, and schools closed, commercial growers could not quickly or easily repackage huge amounts of product for retail sale. At the same time, surging consumer demand at grocery stores outpaced the production capabilities of retail food packagers. The upside has been that smaller regional growers and wholesalers who had already been diversifying their products and sales channels began to fill the gap with direct-to-consumer sales both online and at local and regional farmstands. Farms such as G. Flores Produce and J & L Green Farm in Virginia were well-positioned to bring a variety of produce, meat, and dairy directly to consumers. Tom McDougall, owner of 4P, a food distributor in Virginia, began stepping up his distribution of products from farms such as G. Flores to restaurants, stores, and individual consumers. “Wouldn’t it be amazing,” asks McDougall, “if we came out of the other end of [COVID-19] with a more equitable, distributed, and resilient food system?”
While large-scale commercial farms have an inherent ability to reach more consumers more efficiently, the decentralized nature of more regional agriculture systems allows growers and distributors like G. Flores and 4P to respond more quickly to shifts in supply and demand, which could ultimately strengthen the food system and help eliminate food shortages. Groups such as the Mid-Atlantic Food Resilience and Access Coalition are already matching producers with buyers, creating what they call “community feeding networks” to reach consumers, institutions, and food banks, and to help keep farmers solvent. It remains to be seen how regional food systems and larger commercial agricultural systems will work together to solve potential food shortages, but the pandemic has already created unique alliances that may ultimately decrease food insecurity across the country.
Global Meat Consumption To Increase Post-Pandemic, Says United Nations
Global meat consumption will grow by 12% in the coming decade with lower-cost poultry accounting for half the increase, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In “Agricultural Outlook,” a joint report with Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD), the FAO predicts that poultry consumption worldwide will rise by 145 tons by 2029 and that aquaculture will surpass capture fisheries by 2024 as the top source of fish. Low feed costs for poultry and livestock will make these ventures more attractive to farmers, according to the report, and consumers in middle-income countries will continue to supplement traditional diets with more meat as it becomes affordable.
In developing countries, especially in Asia and Africa, meat consumption will rise five times faster than in developed nations, according to the joint report, as consumers in developed nations seek meat alternatives. “Environmental and health concerns in high-income countries are expected to support a transition away from animal-based protein toward alternative sources, as well as more immediate substitution away from red meat, notably beef, toward poultry and fish,” said the report. Although meat consumption is predicted to eventually rise, The OECD-FAO estimates that global meat consumption fell by 2% in 2019 with China experiencing at least a 21% drop in pork consumption due to the outbreak of African swine flu epidemic.
Global Coffee Consumption Plummets With Stay-At-Home Orders
Coffee consumption worldwide is set to fall this year for the first time since 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Stay-at-home orders have cratered sales at coffee shops, as 95% of the out-of-home market shuttered, according to industry researcher Marex Spectron. “It will be a slow and staggered comeback for us as a lot of the offices in London are not coming back on until after summer, and some may even open only next year,” said Robert Robinson, co-founder of London coffee chain Notes. In Brazil, low demand at Suplicy Cafes Especiais, one of the country’s largest chains, forced the company to reschedule payments to farmers for shipments already delivered. International coffee giants Dunkin’ and Starbucks have struggled to mitigate the loss of commuter traffic with increased drive-thru and pickup sales, but low demand worldwide is already taking a toll on coffee’s market value. The value of arabica beans is predicted to drop by roughly 10% in the second half of 2020 to about 90 cents a pound, according to Citigroup Inc.
