Food Security in the Face of the Coronavirus

"We had four more planes scheduled for this week, but now they aren't coming."

"Broccoli has to be hand-cut. I need an army of people to do that. From now until mid-August I'm planting and harvesting because our retailers want a constant supply."

"Those weeks [in late March] are key because after the greenhouses start, the push is on for outdoor growers, people like me, who seed broccoli and cucumbers and peppers, things like that."

"We were slated in the next month to bring in 4,600 people and 13,600 in the next three months."

"Those people are very important."

Ken Forth, broccoli grower, chair, labour section, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association

"We are not running out of food or essential supplies."

"Our supply chain and store teams are responding to the spikes in volume and quickly getting the most important items back on the shelf."

Loblaw chief executive Galen Weston

"Any time there's a disruption in those rates [steady customer buying] you either have a big buildup in inventory or you have a depletion in inventory."

"When you double or triple the rate at which something is taken out of the system, you end up with gaps. So the gaps may appear in grocery stores, at the wholesaler or even the manufacturer."

"Once an equilibrium is re-established things will get back to normal."

"If the cost of Italian cheese goes up because of what's happening in Italy right now, they won't be able to keep that price down."

David Soberman, Canadian National Chair in strategic marketing, Rotman School of Management

"The Canadian dollar has been diving for six or seven days, that really hurts grocers."

"And while the Canadian government made a decision on travel to keep us safe, they didn't address the issue of foreign labour coming in to support the agricultural sector."

"This could be really problematic for them."

Sylvain Charlebois, scientific director, Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University

"We at least need a skeleton crew to seed the crops."

"And by the time of harvest, I'm hopeful a lot of these tensions will be reduced."

"A lot of farmers rely on these workers and they are very stressed. [I'm hopeful] we'll find solutions quickly."

Mary Robinson, president, Canadian Federation of Agriculture

New border restrictions amid the COVID-19 outbreak have food producers wondering about the approximately 50,000 migrant workers Canadian farms depend on annually. (Jason Kryk/The Canadian Press)

Obviously, the strategists in the Prime Minister's Office failed to take into account the impact on the security of the Canadian food market during this time of crisis with the novel coronavirus spreading throughout the country, when vegetable growers are unable to bring in crop workers from abroad that Canada has always relied upon to do the kind of backbreaking agricultural work at harvest that Canadian workers are loathe to take on themselves.

The newly-declared, sweeping travel restrictions, and the cutting off of the flow of seasonal labour threatens to disrupt harvest on Canadian farms. Foreign travellers to Canada have been banned in an effort to contain the swift spread of the novel coronavirus, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeua saying all international visitors to Canada, with the exception of Americans, diplomats and flight crews, will henceforth be refused entry at airports.

Countries including the Caribbean, Guatemala and Mexico supply Canadian farms with about 60,000 annual workers, arriving in Canada to seed and harvest crops of tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cabbages and other fruits and vegetables. Airplanes are hired by farmers' associations to transport workers to Canada. A deadline of midnight Tuesday was the cut-off date to bring in the last group of 250 employees, explained Ken Forth.

A full three-quarters of seasonal labourers who yearly support the fruit and vegetable growers in Canada arrive from outside the country and though several thousand have already arrived and are working in greenhouses, the incoming workers tend to dramatically increase in late March, when seeding season is initiated. Normally, workers would be arriving in large numbers daily over the next few weeks.

The agricultural sector has a lineage of resilience.Elliot Ferguson/Postmedia Network files

Grocers have had to address the public's anxiety over food availability, manifested in panic buying, with assurances that there will be no shortages of essential food items. And to ensure an evenly paced food availability efforts have been made to persuade Canadians to buy no more food than they would normally purchase for an average two-week period. While that is reasonable and appropriate, it has failed to persuade a certain element of the consuming public, who continue to raid supermarket shelves, leaving toilet paper, meat and frozen vegetables in short supply.

Add caption

Growers' associations state that fresh produce is available and there is no immediate supply issue. Oddly, enough supermarket counters burst with fresh fruits and vegetables, some homegrown in hothouses, and some imported from abroad. There is no scarcity of food, yet bare shelves throughout grocery stores are linked to a disruption in the reliance on 'just-in-time' supply relying on people to buy in steady rates.

Loblaw chief executive Weston assures the public that Shoppers Drug Mart chain which Loblaw also owns, and the supermarkets will see no rise in "a single price on any item", taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis. According to analysts that sunny outlook may be unrealistic given the pressure on labour and the state of the Canadian dollar, where local workers could fill in for seasonal employees but would demand a higher rate of recompense for their work than foreign workers, pushing up product pricing.

Customers stand in line to place an order at Nosso Talho butcher shop and grocery store in Toronto, where sales are up by 400 per cent, according to its manager. (Andy Hincenbergs/CBC)