"We’ve done surprisingly little preparing for these kinds of shocks," said Roni Neff, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Center for a Livable Future. When Neff and her colleagues surveyed local governments on food system resilience, "the people that responded were those that were already thinking about this, and of those that responded only 10 percent considered their local jurisdiction to be prepared."
Nor can local governments rely on the feds. The concern with a large-scale shock is that it could trigger what researchers call "multiple bread basket failures," according to Michael Puma, director of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. "As far as I know there is no very clear governmental strategy—at least that’s unclassified—that clarifies how the U.S. would deal with a major disruption in production."
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture does have grants and loans for building a more resilient food system, that’s far from being a comprehensive plan for responding to giant climate shocks. "Some of us in academia have been trying to push the governmental agencies to take notice of this," Puma said, "with little success to date." Because food system resilience in response to crisis involves a mix of domestic agriculture, international trade,
disaster response, and more, there’s no one agency that would be able to address this. "In the 1970s the U.S. government had prepared a report on potential strategies for managing U.S. food reserves, and this was in response to the Soviet grain crisis," Puma added. "But then it was somewhat abandoned and ignored and not really used moving forward."
A comprehensive strategy would have to start with good data. "We know what to do in general" when it comes to food system resilience, Neff said, but "there’s really quite scant research on confirming what works and what to prioritize." Changing that would involve a combination of funding and coordination. "We haven’t seen a major amount of funding available for this type of question and specifically to develop policies or new institutional responses to this type of threat," said Puma.
"When we’ve been trying to do various projects with modeling, like where is the food, who’s got it, how much food is in the Baltimore area right now if all the roads got cut off," Neff said, "we don’t know, because a lot of it is in various individual businesses and storehouses and they’re each keeping their own data." (One such study of New York City in 2016 estimated "the New York City food system holds roughly 4 to 5 days of regular consumption of food stock on average"—not an encouraging figure if one were to imagine incoming supply chains being disrupted.)
Even without better data, though, it’s possible to identify specific vulnerabilities in the U.S. food system and changes that should probably be made. The high efficiency of the current food system has often come at the cost of redundancy—meaning backup plans. "We need to have more diverse places where food is coming from; we need multiple routes, roads, where it’s coming from, multiple storage facilities," Neff said. And while sudden systemic agricultural reform would both be hard and come with its own risks, Puma argued, there’s "low-hanging fruit" like fighting the increasing "consolidation of farmland," reducing overreliance on fertilizer and pesticides, and being a little more skeptical of so-called smart agriculture: "If you’re introducing the use of drones into the agricultural system, that’s a new type of risk to take into account."
Then there are things that can be done quickly, and locally. Communities that "had been doing some of this work before the pandemic hit were better able to adapt" to the 2020 disruptions, Neff said. And "one of the key things was having people in the local food system connected to each other and knowing each other and having those relationships in the first place so people knew who to call and contact and help develop responses."
You’ll be reading more about food system resilience and agriculture reform at TNR shortly. But in the meantime, if you’re not feeling exactly reassured as you read this, you’re not alone. At the end of these calls, given the lack of preparedness at the governmental level, I asked whether the people who have been socking away hundreds of pounds of rice and beans in their basements might have the right idea, if not exactly an equitable one.
"The preppers definitely do have a point," Puma said. "I think it’s a multiscale solution, and I think low-hanging fruit is to encourage people to have more food stored at home so that they’re not as vulnerable. You want to have a little buffer capacity as individuals so if there’s no food for a week you’re not scrambling."
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