Dr. Al Mussell, the Research Lead with Agri-Food Economic Systems, said emergency planning has focussed on border closures, animal diseases and, in some cases, plant diseases but no focus on absenteeism due to a pandemic.
Dr. Mussell suggests greater cooperation, coordination and flexibility among governments and industry to minimize disruptions within agriculture due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said Canadian people are fortunate to have a sound system and coming from the right place, a good ag and food supply chain that works very smoothly with few bugs.
“But now we’re confronting challenges never seen before, so we need to work together,” said Dr. Mussell. “And the industry will need to engage with the government to figure out if it’s regulatory issues that need changing or temporarily waived or adjusted in some way. We’ve tried to come at it with some initial ideas, but there’s much more thinking to do, I’m sure.”
He said one way to address absenteeism, thinking about the processing plants, for example and elsewhere in agribusiness, is an opportunity to cross-train employees. Where a person has training for one job in a packing plant, maybe train them to do two or three jobs. If some people fall ill, that person could fill in and do somebody else’s job who wasn’t able to come to work but keeps the packing plant going. Maybe the line would have to slow down a little bit. Hopefully not, but the company could manage to keep things going in one fashion or another, and for certain specific kinds of jobs, be able to do it across farms.
Dr. Mussell said the most urgent issue right now could be in the livestock supply chain, so poultry, pork, beef, probably dairy and eggs as well where the worry is a sudden closure or lost capacity let’s say, in a processing plant. Today’s processing plants, much fewer in number, are massive and efficiently run plants.
“The problem is we will have people who either can’t come to work because they’re sick or told not to go to work because they’re locked down in their residences, said Mussell. “Any of those things can create sudden bottlenecks in our supply chain. If you have a big one that goes down and now you have to figure out somehow to reroute the farm product to a different plant.”
He said this creates a real need for industry coordination within the industry. But also coordination with the government because the regulations around food processing don’t anticipate this type of thing, and can be quite prescriptive in terms of who supposed to do what at what time and so on. The movement of people remains a concern, and it is good to see the Feds keeping the foreign worker programs, including the seasonal Ag worker program going. “But we’re tying immigration considerations together with public health as we never had previously. So that’s one that we’re going to have to watch very closely, I think,” he said.
Mussell said these surges in demand at the grocery store are difficult to handle, all through the supply chain. They create sharp increases in demand. But at some point people lock themselves down in their homes and make fewer trips to the grocery store. Buying forward slows demand, he said.
Mussell said has a concern particularly in Western Canada and elsewhere as absenteeism affects export and import logistics certainly trucking, but all segments, dockworkers, everybody involved in the administration of imports and exports.
“We knew before we got into this, we’d be short of ocean-going containers, whether reefer containers or containers shipping storable products like green or what have you. That’s only going to get worse now,” he said.
The other concern is the imports like coffee, tea, orange juice, food products, feed ingredients, pesticide products, etc. And there’s also a sense that countries who export those products will begin to think a little bit that they need to feed themselves or supply themselves first before they share their products with others. It is happening with medical supplies and could continue into ag and food.
Mussell said, on the one hand, it is good to reassure the public the supply chain is good but not interpreted to mean that there are no problems here.
“For heaven’s sake, we have a never foreseen emergency. It’s the jumping-off point for everybody to understand that because we have integrity in our system, we can work together. And figure out how to accommodate these new, in some cases, pretty sobering challenges that we have to deal with and expedite it right away,” he added. •
— By Harry Siemens

As we all do our part in preventing infection and the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
The Canadian Pork Council (CPC) is participating in regular conference calls with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) to work on these priorities:
• Food safety and food security for Canadians
• Borders remain open to the flow of goods for trade
• Human resources and access to temporary foreign workers for producers and processors
As a result of COVID-19, the Canadian Pork Council (CPC) and its provincial partners, have made the decision to postpone all full validations under the Canadian Quality Assurance (CQA) program and the Canadian Pork Excellence (CPE) program.
Those sites that are due for a Full CPE Validation with a program expiry date on or before June 30, 2020 will automatically be granted a 3-month extension to their expiry date. For example, if your site’s expiry date is usually April 12th, your new expiry date will be July 12th.
Those sites that are due for a Partial CQA Validation (where no site visit is required) will still have to abide by their current expiry date.
Currently, the sites that are due for a Full CPE Validation with an expiry date on or after July 1, 2020 should still plan for that date, but the situation will be reassessed at the end of April and an update sent to affected sites. •