Barns are brimming. But the longer the crisis lasts, the nastier things are likely to get
China banned package tours from heading overseas for the lunar new-year holiday. This gave cold sweats to David Parker, New Zealand’s trade minister. Fewer tourists were a disappointment, but planes that did not bring tourists in one direction would not take agricultural produce back in the other—significantly more worrying, given that China is New Zealand’s biggest customer for the food which is its biggest export.
But the biggest problem lies not in the system’s bottlenecks. It lies in the effects on consumers of almost a billion incomes reduced or lost. Theestimates that the economic fallout from covid-19 could see the number of people suffering from acute hunger double to 265m over the course of this year. Developed countries are not immune. In America queues at food banks in some cities stretch for kilometres.
Today cereal stocks are twice as high as they were then . Bulk shipping is 20 times cheaper and crude oil is just $30 a barrel. That makes all manner of inputs cheaper and pushes the price of fuel feedstocks like corn and sugar lower still to boot. If the number of importing countries has risen for most crops, so has the number of exporting countries. That makes trade more resilient to swings in supply and demand.
As a result of these changes, some food producers are in trouble. French fishermen say they are throwing back two-thirds of their catch. Australia is facing an avocado glut. Alain Goubau, a farmer in Ontario, now feeds some of his milk back to his cows. But there is a limit to what can be recycled; most of what cannot be sold will be wasted. Millions of litres of keg beer is going stale. Theis expecting to lose €400m of potatoes.
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