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‘We Either Produce Food Or Not’, Smithfield CEO Warns, As Virus Closes Sioux Falls Plant
"We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19", Smithfield Foods CEO Ken Sullivan said Sunday, in a statement announcing the indefinite shuttering of a plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The decision extends a closure initially described as temporary, and it isn't really a "decision". It comes a day after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (along with Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken) penned a letter to the company asking for a 14-day s
Who produces their water; shut it off. Done.
While this may seem like an obvious step right now: one plant with a high rate of infection, if Neel Kashkari is right per your earlier post, we could easily get to a point where we have dozens of plants in the same situation and then what if the rest of want to eat?
rest of us want to ear
LOL! I give up!
I like to ear. Good point on the origin.
We had a very hasty shut down of the economy. No unified command. When I first started reading about Corona in January it was mostly through medical literature. Alarm bells were not ringing . Cautious optimism obviously looks like denial in the rearview mirror. The Fed has seemed to act very quickly on their second major emergency. Are we really going to be ready for the fall? I think most people are willing to wear masks and social distance. Seems like a silly time to try to put the post office out of business with a coming election. Will Jared Kushner really unify the country and command structures
When I hear “Smithfield,” I think bacon. Wondering if there is any connection between the fact that the first case of Covid-19 was in the Hubei province countryside, where much of the landscape is covered by industrial pig farming, and not the wet markets of Wuhan as initially reported. Bat to pig to man and not man eats bat. The possible implications does not put me in a happy place.
BTW, my guess is that most employees are underpaid Hispanics as it is in the slaughterhouse industry. Close, clean, test, and protect.
Especially since when Smithfield was procured there were plenty of reassurances that they would not be using them to dump Chinese pork into US markets. So how is this Chinese virus so prevalent there? Infected pigs from China? Maybe not… but maybe.
Factory processed meat products are hardly a necessity, not to mention that they require significantly more labor and up to 25x as much energy to produce than their Kcal plant equivalents. For what it’s worth, Braudel, in his famous history book “The Mediterranean” spends an entire extended section deducing the estimated historical size of the greater population based on the ranges of feasible grain production in North Africa.
And those industrial pig farms create an enormous amount of excrement that are held in holding ponds (lakes?) that can “leak” into human water supplies. Witness Hurricane Florence meets North Carolina pig farms. But JOBS!
They’re not asking the owners to close the plant permanently. Two weeks to clean it up and to give the workers a chance to get better doesn’t sound that onerous. And if it turns out that more than one has to do this we should still be able to keep bacon on the table. For the record, Kushner is just another Trump pseudo-expert with little or no experience in what they’re asked to do. That’s why we’re in this mess.
Having thought about this I realize that this is another dropped ball for Trump and his band of idiots. The nations food supply and it’s safety is one of their babies. Somewhere between farmers having to plow their vegetables into the ground because there are no buyers and perhaps limiting the number of trucks entering the US from Mexico (some going to Canada) the thought that food company employees would also need to be protected with testing and PPE where possible should have come up. AND it should be a high priority now that it has been raised as a problem. I have heard nothing.
Simple…
Do the fast 15 minute test on every employee before allowing them to come into the plant.
Heavy sanitize the plant and enforce face masks & gloves.
Get back to operating levels while enforcing effective standards.
Question becomes… Do you have enough employees to operate then may need to hire temps too.
Simple??… not so much….
The world is awash in competition for 15 minute test kits, let alone any testing type.
Not to mention there’s still a massive shortage of masks, gloves, and other PPE.
Who “enforces” these new standards – the horribly under-staffed USDA?
Good luck hiring cheap labor temps – all the undocumented workers currently reside in detention camps.
Trumps tells the states to get their own PPE, ventilators. etc., and then there are federal seizures of that very same equipment. WTF.