'Our Food System Is Very Much Modeled on Plantation Economics'
MAY 13, 2020
CounterSpin interview with Ricardo Salvador on the coronavirus food crisis
JANINE JACKSON
Janine Jackson interviewed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Ricardo Salvador about the coronavirus food crisis for the May 8, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners have likely seen the images: farmers dumping milk, smashing eggs, plowing produce under. At the same time, in the same country, people line up at food banks, unable to access or afford nutritious food.
At the nexus of the health crisis and the economic crisis of Covid-19 is a food crisis. And it’s along every dimension, from farm laborers to restaurant workers to hungry people. As with so many things, the pandemic didn’t create the problems, but it’s making them harder to deny.
. . .
JJ: If we could just talk, first, about the supply chain itself. What is it about the food system we have, that makes it a reasonable or necessary response to the crisis for some farmers to plow vegetables under that people could be eating?
RS: It has to do with the structure of agriculture, and I think your question is very well-framed. It actually is a logical thing for most farmers to plow under their food, rather than try to deal with a food system that is very specialized, that operates at very large scale. It’s very concentrated. And it operates along a few well-established channels. So it’s important to understand what those channels are, to then understand why it’s logical for farmers to do what is being reported, as well as to understand that this issue of food waste is a serious problem. And it is not exclusively on farmers. It’s an issue of the structure of the system.
More:
https://fair.org/home/our-food-system-is-very-much-modeled-on-plantation-economics/
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