SUPPLY CHAINS
COVID and the chicken meat industry impacts and learnings to date Words by Dr Vivien Kite
Background Chicken is the most popular meat consumed in Australia, representing nearly half of all meat eaten. ABARES estimates we will consume nearly 49kg each this year. Australia produces more than 700 million chickens per annum. This means that more than 2.5 million chickens need to be brought into processing plants from farms every single week day to be slaughtered and dressed. It also means there are another 2.5 million day-old chicks hatching out in hatcheries, waiting to go out onto farms to replace them. Chicken meat production is effectively a pipeline - one that can’t be simply turned off and on again. In this respect, the chicken industry is, by its very nature, perhaps the most vulnerable of all agricultural industries to disruptions in the supply chain.
March 2020 The World Health Organisation officially declared the COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March, 2020. Acutely aware of its vulnerability to supply chain disruptions, the Australian Chicken Meat Federation (ACMF) was quickly on the front foot, releasing guidelines for the most vulnerable of our workplaces within a week of the pandemic being declared. These detailed guidelines provided
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recommendations to help businesses manage the risks of COVID in chicken processing plants. These workplaces present the greatest risk to our people, given the large numbers of employees working in close proximity indoors and within cold environments, and are the ‘choke point’ in the chicken supply chain. By 2pm on 16 March 2020, the six major chicken companies, which between them produce 90% of Australia’s chicken, had all agreed to adopt these guidelines. These initial guidelines were subsequently adapted for use by a number of other industries and were also adopted by several government agencies. In the month following their release, these guidelines were updated four times to reflect new information and knowledge about COVID, including how it manifests and spreads. Interestingly, it was a full two months before any government agency came out with guidelines specific for meat processing businesses, despite this sector being identified early on as a high-risk environment for COVID transmission.
own expertise and knowledge to develop response strategies in an emergency, rather than waiting for government to provide advice. While the industry’s guidelines were based on the best possible scientific advice at the time, the medical and scientific community’s imperfect understanding of how the virus spread also hindered the success of our efforts in the early phase of the pandemic, as we were working under the belief that transmission was primarily via contact or large droplet spread, rather than by aerosols. Therefore, the use of face masks was not a key element of the industry’s early advice to participants other than in the most exposed roles in processing plants. Had the critical role of aerosol transmission been known, an emphasis on the use of face masks to reduce the risks of transmission would have been adopted much earlier. The industry also learned that it lacked a strong, direct relationship with health departments, and this proved to be a hindrance in terms of managing the challenges created by COVID. Nevertheless, our strong
Learnings from the first six months of the pandemic
relationships with food safety regulators provided a critical conduit to health departments and assisted in overcoming any obstacles. We also realised very early on in the pandemic that there was a need
Perhaps the most pertinent learning from the early phase of the pandemic was the importance of the industry itself being proactive and using its
