“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 suspension of operations at the facility in order to allow workers to self-isolate.
At just 730, South Dakota had among the lowest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any US state as of Easter Sunday.
Of those 730, at least 238 of them are tied to the company, according to Noem’s letter to Sullivan. On Sunday, health officials said 293 of the total were connected to the plant.
“We understand Smithfield has taken numerous steps to help mitigate COVID-19 spread, yet we believe there is an opportunity for you to do more”, Noem told Sullivan, adding that as of Saturday, “individuals who work at Smithfield account for 54% of the total cases reported in Minnehaha County”.
She called that “an alarming statistic”. And indeed it is. Here’s the breakdown by county in the state:
In addition to recommending that Smithfield suspend operations for at least two weeks, Noem also asked the company to “continue to provide full pay and benefits to its employees during this 14-day suspension as well as paid sick time for infected and symptomatic employees to encourage them to stay home”.
All of this, Noem reminded Sullivan, is consistent with “facts and science” regarding COVID-19’s incubation period and spread.
Noem emphasized that she was cognizant of the extent to which her request was no small matter. “Please know we fully understand the gravity of what we are requesting”, she said. “However, this is your moment to take swift action”.
If you read the letter (embedded in full below) it’s clear that Noem wasn’t asking. She was telling. On Sunday, Sullivan acknowledged as much, while effectively suggesting it’s a bad decision.
Here’s the statement from Sullivan which accompanied the press release announcing the closure of the Sioux Falls plant:
The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply. It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 cases are now ubiquitous across our country. The virus is afflicting communities everywhere. The agriculture and food sectors have not been immune. Numerous plants across the country have COVID-19 positive employees. We have continued to run our facilities for one reason: to sustain our nation’s food supply during this pandemic. We believe it is our obligation to help feed the country, now more than ever. We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.
While Sullivan’s remarks are duly noted, I would make the simple point that sick people should not be packing meat regardless of whether COVID-19 can be spread through packaged foods (there is no evidence that it can, according to the FDA).
Of course, people will die without food, but not necessarily without bacon (granted, bacon fans would strongly disagree). And while it’s quite obviously true that essential businesses must be kept open and running where possible, this situation (wherein nearly 40% of the entire state’s COVID-19 cases are linked to a single plant) is one of the more clear-cut cases for temporarily closing down an otherwise critical part of the food supply chain.
That is, this isn’t a case where a couple of people were infected and promptly sent home for a month. The state has 730 confirmed infections. Nearly 300 of them are in people who work at the plant. You’d have a hard time conjuring a more compelling argument for shuttering an admittedly critical facility than that.
The punchline (and that’s something of a misnomer here, considering this is the furthest thing from funny), is that despite its history as “an American food company”, Smithfield is, in fact, owned by a Chinese conglomerate. The Virginia-based pork producer was acquired by WH Group six years ago.
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.