Food and Pharma Matters
Agriculture and Pharmaceuticals are also Critical Infrastructure
COVID-19 still hovers over the world, yet it’s possible to see some faint but significant silver linings. The most obvious one is how the pandemic has forced everyone to understand the importance of supply chains – and how they apply to the medicines and food that literally keep us alive.
Before worldwide lockdowns began in March 2020, “nobody was really talking about supply chains. People just expected them to work and deliver the products,” says Lynn Torrel, Chief Procurement and Supply Chain Officer at Flex, Ltd., a multinational electronics manufacturer.
“Now supply chain is on everyone’s mind, … the importance of supply chain and supply chain management,” she said in an episode of an MIT podcast series devoted to supply chains.
In the early days of the pandemic it became clear quickly that there were serious problems with supply chains just delivering. Bottlenecks grew all over the place in the delivery of both raw materials and finished products and goods.
Some, though not all, of these are being eased now. As the pandemic wears on though, what has become apparent on is how tight and intricate supply chains can be, and how there can unexpected consequences for the smooth delivery of food and vital medicines, including vaccines.
The problems can manifest in odd ways, and a small change in one aspect of supply can expand quickly. In September 2021 the entire pork industry in Britain was disrupted by a shortage of carbon dioxide needed to stun pigs entering abattoirs. It happened after gas prices jumped suddenly, which led to the closure of two of Britain’s biggest CO2 plants, which in turn led to a backlog so large that farmers warned they would have to cull 120,000 pigs.
The mass cull was delayed, though not necessarily averted, when the British government intervened with emergency funding for CO2 supplies and with temporary visas for some 5,000 foreign truckers needed to move the livestock quickly. But the point is clear: critical infrastructure is not just about roads, rails and power lines . Fresh food and safe pharmaceutical supplies depend on every link in the chain, from the raw materials used for feed and growing to the drivers that move supplies and the freezers that protect the goods.
In the early days of the pandemic it became clear quickly that there were serious problems with supply chains just delivering. Bottlenecks grew all over the place in the delivery of both raw materials and finished products and goods.
Every part of the supply chain matters
In Canada the public learned about the importance critical infrastructure to food in the early days of the pandemic when in many places, including supermarkets, it was nearly impossible to find a bag of flour for a few weeks. The lesson was reinforced when it was difficult as well in the first weeks and months of COVID to keep delivering adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitizer.
The key importance of a robust and reliable pharmaceutical supply chain has become obvious since the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines and the haphazard and complicated rollout that followed. While it’s true that millions of Canadians have received double doses of vaccine this year, it would be hard for even the most sophisticated analyst to unravel exactly how the supply chain to deliver vaccines worked. And it would be harder still to suggest that relying on word of mouth and the diligence of volunteer online “Vaccine Hunters” was optimal.
What began ostensibly as a massive push by the federal government to purchase more than enough supply of vaccine for the entire country tumbled into a patchwork of delivery, both of boxes and vials to drugstores and clinic and of needles into Canadians’ arms. Part of the problem comes from how the rollout was organized. Rather than rely on a systematic nationwide program to get people vaccinated, delivery was left to provinces and municipalities.
The result was millions of Canadians turning to a legion of volunteer Vaxhunters who delivered supply chain information … by going viral, if you will. It worked thanks mainly to the volunteers’ diligence and luck – not thanks to systemic supply chain planning.
Supply chain disruptions have been less dramatic, but still significant when it comes to food and agricultural products. A blog by Shiphero, a warehouse management software company talks about “the empty shelf crisis of 2021.”
It’s still hit and miss whether shelves are empty in particular grocery aisles, and this is not just because the finished goods haven’t arrived. They’re empty because of infrastructure bottlenecks at various stages in supply chains, from manufacturing, to finding containers, to human resources.
While it’s true that millions of Canadians have received double doses of vaccine this year, it would be hard for even the most sophisticated analyst to unravel exactly how the supply chain to deliver vaccines worked.
Pandemic is only part of the problem
“The pandemic has also affected aluminum manufacturers, which has prevented them from producing familiar brands of canned fruit and soft drinks. What’s more, with transportation and logistics problems slowing down domestic shipping, many grocery stores won’t have their popular canned goods for the foreseeable future,” Shiphero says.
Pandemic pressure is only part of the reason for the instability and disruption to food and pharma supply chains. Industry, and the policymakers and governments that regulate industrial sectors, have had to make decisions on the fly. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has shown a knack for serving up little-predicted new menaces, such as the Delta variant.
The pandemic is only an aggravating factor in a situation that already existed though. Too often, policymakers, thought leaders and regulators see agricultural and pharmaceutical products only as the finished goods to be supplied rather than the last links on a long supply chain, the same as say, a car is linked to the chrome, steel and microchips that go into its manufacture.
Too often we see details without understanding the whole picture. When (pandemic permitting) people go to a luxury restaurant and order a steak, it’s likely that few think closely at that point about the complicated and often messy journey the Grade A beef took to arrive from a breezy pasture to the plate. It’s similarly likely that before the problem with pigs in Britain, not many people even realized that commercially produced carbon dioxide was part of the pork supply chain.
Likewise too, before the pandemic, it’s likely that few people, other than researchers and scientists, gave a lot of thought to the torturous journey a vaccine formula must take to get from a sealed lab, to human trials, to emergency approval and then finally, as the Pfizer and Moderna COVID formulas did in August 2021, to full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.
The shortage of systemic thinking about both food products and pharmaceuticals can show up as nasty blips in critical infrastructure. Early during the pandemic, when the worry was about shortages of goods such as toilet paper, it didn’t take long for it to emerge that supplies of meat products were imperilled because of a little foreseen blip in the supply chain – outbreaks of COVID-19 at meat processing plants.
Similarly, in the summer of 2021, a record-breaking drought in North America led desperate farmers to sell their herds at rock-bottom prices and, as in Britain just months later, to contemplate mass slaughter of their animals before they can be marketed, at the same time as more people than ever are showing up at food banks.
The pandemic is only an aggravating factor in a situation that already existed though. Too often, policymakers, thought leaders and regulators see agricultural and pharmaceutical products only as the finished goods to be supplied rather than the last links on a long supply chain.
It can be better
It doesn’t have to be as desperate and gloomy as this. The pandemic has already pointed the way to successful strategies for building and strengthening the critical infrastructure that supports agriculture and pharmaceuticals.
On the pharma side, Project Warp Speed, spearheaded by the United States and Western countries, showed how systemic thinking can rise to a national, multinational or even a global challenge. It’s hard to remember that in spring 2020, the idea that a vaccine would arrive by the end of last year seemed to many like a wild dream, and the idea that a majority of North Americans would be vaccinated by now seemed impossible.
It happened because a few quick, assertive decisions were made. That’s called leadership.
Politicians of all persuasions should get at least some credit for allowing regulations that normally apply to pharmaceutical development to be loosened during this emergency; they understood that supplying vaccines was part of system. True, many governments were inconsistent in delivering vaccines after they approved them, but that just showed the difference when they stopped applying systemic thinking.
The international development and in some cases, distribution of vaccines showed how systemic thinking can move forward a project that has many moving parts that span across the infrastructures of many countries.
This can be replicated not just in the production of pharmaceuticals and medicine but for other key commodities such as food stuffs and animal feeds.
When it comes to agriculture, it’s never an easy road to build supply chains to feed the world, but it can be done.
The international development and in some cases, distribution of vaccines showed how systemic thinking can move forward a project that has many moving parts that span across the infrastructures of many countries.
Everything connects
Part of the answer involves a more organized and rational deployment of technology, such as the increasing use of sensors and drones to regulate and monitor watering and crop harvesting. Big data can track your online package delivery; it can also track when to turn on and off irrigation systems.
There are also promising leading edge movements, such as no-till or low-till agriculture, the rewilding of marginal farmland to protect biodiversity and encouraging less meat-eating to curb methane production from gassy animals and address climate change. If these movements are replicated across the whole worldwide agricultural sector, it will be necessary to understand how they affect the critical infrastructure of food supply. Will they enhance or inhibit the amount of food a hungry world needs? Can low-impact agriculture deliver enough food on time and at prices ordinary people can afford?
These questions were anticipated in some quarters before COVID. In early 2019, the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health brought together 37 world scientists who looked at whether it is even possible to feed a hungry world and if it is, how to do so.
“How food is produced, what is consumed, and how much is lost or wasted all heavily shape the health of both people and planet,” the commission said. “A radical transformation” of the global food system is needed – and it can be achieved.
“Feeding 10 billion people a healthy diet within safe planetary boundaries for food production by 2050 is both possible and necessary,” the commission said. In Canada, a team at Ryerson University’s Centre for Studies in Food Security is looking at ways to make local food supply chains more resilient against sudden shocks.
How food is produced, what is consumed, and how much is lost or wasted all heavily shape the health of both people and planet.
Time for systems leadership
All of this speaks to the need for thought leaders, researchers, policymakers, executives and managers to think holistically about food, pharmaceuticals and the supply chain.
Fertilizer comes from minerals and drugs are made from plants; food travels by land, sea and air and vaccines got around the world in record time by planes burning jet fuel. All the various goods that we depend on for life are part of our critical infrastructure.
It’s a system. It requires new thinking about how to make it work, but it’s an old idea. “Everything connects to everything else” is how Leonardo Da Vinci put it.
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Robert Dimitrieff
As President of Patriot Forge Co. and Niagara Energy Products, Robert Dimitrieff is in a unique position to share insights into the many ways Canada’s advanced manufacturing industry is building a solid foundation on which Canada’s economy can grow – locally, provincially, and nationally.
Robert provides relevant and real-world perspectives on how issues like tariffs, taxes, and economic policy can help or hinder the progress being made by advanced manufacturers. Most recently, he’s worked closely with government policy-makers and has spoken to industry and business groups on the topics of trade and tariffs.