9 minute read
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 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.
Learnings from the first six months of the pandemic
Perhaps the most pertinent learning from the early phase of the pandemic was the importance of the industry itself being proactive and using its 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 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
for better understanding amongst governments and policy makers about how chicken meat is produced, and specifically the fact that it is simply not possible to just turn chicken production on and off.
The ACMF therefore invested a significant amount of time and effort in the early stages of the pandemic, cultivating a better understanding amongst decision-makers of what the chicken supply chain looks like, what it involves, and what inputs and services are necessary to ensure its smooth operation. A one-page schematic of the chicken supply chain was developed to assist in this respect (see graphic on p.34).
A positive insight from the early phase of the pandemic was the importance of separating our workforces into work teams or ‘bubbles’, which was a key element of the industry’s guidelines from the start. The implementation of this strategy was possibly the most important factor in the industry’s relative success in terms of staving off incursions of COVID early in the pandemic.
Another contributing factor to the industry’s success in negotiating this early stage of the pandemic was its deep understanding of the principles of biosecurity. It is worth noting that one of the most critical poultry diseases relevant to the chicken industry, infectious bronchitis, is also a coronavirus.
Victoria’s second wave of COVID in mid-2020 marked the first incursions of COVID into chicken processing plants. Three Victorian chicken processing facilities were ultimately impacted in this wave. Two of these facilities were fully closed for a period of time following their incursions and one was partially closed, but cooperation between chicken processors, both within the state and interstate, allowed all chickens on farm to be brought into the plants to be processed, thereby avoiding animal welfare and food waste issues and minimising disruption of chicken supply to consumers.
It is believed that the sources of these incursions and, potentially, spread of the virus within the impacted workplaces, included knowingly symptomatic staff coming to work, breaches of workforce bubbles, interaction of staff between shifts and interaction of staff outside the workplace and outside work hours.
A critical development for the chicken industry during this phase was the introduction of workforce caps for the meat processing sector in Victoria. For the poultry industry, this involved a 20% reduction in staff numbers allowed to work at poultry processing plants.
Unfortunately, the introduction of workforce caps occurred at a time when some chicken processing plants were still closed or partially closed due to prior incursions, exacerbating the challenge of ensuring that all chickens that needed to be brought into processing plants to be processed could be processed.
Chicken companies negotiated this crisis by implementing a number of strategies, including the simplification of their product range (meaning that the production of more labour intensive or complex products was paused), and cooperation between processors to ensure birds were processed and turned into products to meet customer orders. The latter strategy was facilitated by an ACCC interim authorisation that allowed the three major Victorian chicken companies and the ACMF to collaborate in order to process chickens and meet demand.
The arrival of Delta
Mid 2021 marked the arrival of the Delta strain of COVID to our shores. To this point, the only incursions of COVID into our most critical facilities were those in Victoria, referred to above.
Following the arrival of Delta, however, a large percentage of our major poultry processing and distribution facilities in both Victoria and NSW ultimately experienced incursions. While complete facility closures were not required, similar strategies were implemented by chicken companies to manage production and supply as had been adopted in the earlier Victorian outbreaks, most notably the simplification of product ranges, resulting in only relatively minor impacts on products reaching the market.
Omicron lands in Australia
The arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron strain of COVID in late 2021 undoubtedly resulted in the most visible impacts of COVID on chicken supply.
Arriving at the same time that Australian and interstate border restrictions were lifting and internal restrictions were easing, incursions of Omicron into chicken processing and distribution over the Christmas and New Year period resulted in significant spikes in staff absenteeism in key chicken industry workplaces
across Queensland, NSW, Victoria and SA. This absenteeism was due to a combination of staff becoming infected or requiring to isolate due to being close contacts in their home or community environment.
During the chicken industry’s January / February 2022 staffing crisis, chicken companies were operating at times with less than 50% of their required staff. Again, companies managed by rationalising the product range to those that required minimal processing, such as raw whole chicken.
This resulted in significant disruptions in supply of chicken products to consumers. For consumers, many of whom had never previously witnessed a situation where they couldn’t purchase their preferred chicken products at their local supermarket or favoured quick service restaurant, the significant impacts of these staff shortages in the chicken supply chain on the availability of chicken was quite ‘shocking’.
As at May 2022, the chicken industry has largely recovered from the supply issues experienced at the beginning of the year. Staffing levels are recovering, although still problematic in many regions where it is proving difficult to get all staff lost over the crisis back to work within the industry, particularly the chicken processing sector.
Key issues and learnings
The chicken industry has historically grown year on year and has quietly gone about the business of meeting Australian consumers’ desire for an increasing range of products and total volume of product. Indeed, the industry’s stability is reflected in the fact that the real price of chicken meat to the consumer has effectively stayed the same for the past 50 years. We expect chicken to remain as Australia’s favourite meat for many years to come.
Nevertheless, we have learned much from the challenges posed by COVID over the past 26 months.
We have learned how ‘close to the wire’ the industry operates in terms of staffing. The development of a strategy for ensuring the industry has access to sufficient staff to meet its future needs should be a priority for the industry going forward.
In terms of resourcing, we learned that the industry body was seriously under-resourced for emergency situations.
On a positive note, the chicken industry’s response to the pandemic and its management of the many challenges it created has reinforced the industry’s self-reliant attitude, resilience and adaptability - attributes without which it could not have navigated the pandemic as successfully as it has.
Dr Vivien Kite is Executive Director, Australian Chicken Meat Federation (ACMF) f
