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COVID-19 AND FOOD SECURITY:
Revisiting the pyramid, grandma and other things
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by Christophe Pelletier, Food and Agriculture Strategist, Canada
OVID-19 has taken our world by storm. There has been little time to react and it will take more time to adapt. In a matter of days, our economy and societies have undergone an acid test like they had not in a long time. Important questions, many of them existential, have had to be asked. Perhaps, the most personal and intrusive one is to decide what is essential and what is non-essential, and by what, the question really has come down to who is and is not essential. This one is rather traumatic because, for many, it has meant that they lost their jobs, part or all of their income, with all the implications about their livelihoods, security, sense of purpose and future. Those who know me know that I look at many things through Maslow’s pyramid of needs. To me, the current troubled times that we are going through and how people cope, or not, with it, is very much the same as revisiting Maslow’s pyramid. Until a few months ago, the world economy seemed to run on all cylinders and, although a recession seemed to be overdue, as one tends to happen every decade or so, there was very little that indicated that the economy would slow down drastically. The stock markets where like a fun fair. Then, everything freezes over. The topic of essential vs non-essential sent us right back to the pyramid. All of a sudden, the lower layers of the pyramid took precedence. Physical security and security of food and shelter became obvious
64 | November 2020 - Milling and Grain
again, and the more superficial matters had to step back a bit.
Regulating supplies
Not only did many household budgets take a painful hit, store shelves were often scarcely filled. This pandemic has shown that our economic model is really built around quantitative growth and abundance but, should conditions change drastically, it is not as agile and resilient as we may have liked to think all this time, especially when nobody really wants to have inventories. Empty shelves did not remain empty for just a couple of days, but it took more like a couple of weeks for some products to reappear in satisfactory quantities, and some items have hardly reappeared at all, even a couple of months into this crisis. Shelves were empty, and yet farmers dumped their products, in particular dairy farmers literally pouring milk down the drain. An outrageous food waste has been taking place, in a time where food banks are overwhelmed and can get enough to help the ones in need. There is some thinking to do about connecting the links of the value chains, because it shows very little value and does not behave like a chain, either. The small shops actually did rather well in this mayhem. They adapted quickly to ensure social distancing. They took orders for pick up and for delivery and prepared them without errors. Most of all, they showed no disruption of supplies. The small meat store had meat and the baker had bread. A look at what flew off the shelves is quite revealing and a confirmation of our revisiting Maslow’s pyramid. Remember