Food Wastage: How COVID-19 cause food pollution

 

Hey Foodies!

Here’s an interesting video we stumbled across over the past week! It is about how a pandemic can lead to severe wastage of food, even though these potatoes are essentially brand new! So how does it happen? 

Supply Chains Breakdown:

Firstly, let us talk about the supply chain breakdown. At the start of the year, due to COVID-19, government policies to lock down via Stay home programs, most food businesses and food wholesalers reduced demand for potatoes. So, let us look at the different segments of supply chains

Fresh Segments

Fresh produce that you can purchase in your local supermarket, which are largely non-affected by COVID-19 and has seen an increase in demand.

Processed Segment

Processed potatoes which are delivered to restaurants and distributors, in the form of raw potatoes or processed goods such as French fries or Hash-browns. In this segment, which accounts for most of the demand, this lack of demand causes a large accumulation of stocks of fresh produce. Therefore, the farmers have no choice but to dispose of their fresh produce in landfills. 

Why is this a pollution problem?

As we have visited in the fertilizer posts, the use of fertilizers can not only degrade soil quality but cause secondary problems such as Eutrophication (Hill, 2010). As such, with a large surplus of produce, this large amount of food wastage causes wastage that does not benefit any parties. With agriculture, the tradeoff for this pollution would be for the benefit of the consumption of fresh produce for people. However, due to COVID-19, these wastages are simply wastage that brings no benefits for anyone. Thus, causing pollution for no inherent benefits for anyone.

Transportation Pollution

Another contributor to pollution in this article will be that of transportation to dispose of these potatoes. Due to the unprecedented amount of potatoes that requires to be discarded, transportation is required to move these products to a far-off landfill. This not only increases the cost of disposal for the locals but also contributes to air pollution, as the majority of the transportation runs by diesel-powered trucks. Due to a large amount of fresh produce involved, I believe that transportation does contribute a significant amount to environmental pollution as well.

Conclusion

All in all, this is an interesting read on how the recent COVID-19 outbreak has caused various problems with food wastage. With the situation of a supply chain breakdown, maybe we need to rethink potential solutions to reduce food wastage. Going forward, I believe that various distributors can manage these supply-chains better and provide this fresh-produce that are going to be wasted to the food bank at low or no-cost. This can therefore reduce the level of wastage, which serves as a much better alternative than a “No Benefits for all” solution.

That’s all for this post! See you at the next one!

 

Detective Wen Hong

 

References

Business Insider. (2020, June 28). Why Millions Of Potatoes Are Being Thrown Away During The Pandemic | Big Business [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALtfQVbHtM0&ab_channel=BusinessInsider

Hill, M. K. (2010). Understanding environmental pollution. Cambridge University Press.