The world’s richest nation grows more food than its citizens can consume, but now struggles to get all that food through the vital supply lines leading to their tables.  

Instead, the unprocessed food is being dumped, smashed, depopulated or “humanely euthanized” in quantities not seen since the Great Depression. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has sent the country spiraling down to a new normal. Many states are under stay-at-home orders and most businesses are on lockdown. The resulting mass unemployment and growing food insecurity, highlight the dependence on a fragile, if efficient, food supply system. 

This supply chain was designed largely using the precise just-in-time management system, which focuses on moving supplies only as needed, with minimal storage and reduced costs as its benefits. 

But the pandemic has exposed flaws in this system. It is no longer working smoothly.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods chairman, John Tyson, said in a recent blog post regarding the operational challenges large food providers were having. 

Staff shortages from sickened workers have compounded the initial problem of the sudden drop in commercial demand for fresh vegetables, meat and dairy from large farms. 

Restaurants, hotels and schools were some of their biggest customers, and with their closing, there were no quick pivots to process massive amounts of food into smaller, consumer-ready packaging.

These mega farms are operating at a loss, as they are forced to continue destroying livestock and crops they cannot sell. 

Many grocers scramble to keep their store shelves stocked to meet increased demand from shoppers stuck at home.  And many newly jobless Americans are lining up, often for hours at a time, at food banks.

This unforeseen food waste catastrophe could have possibly been mitigated with a more decentralized food supply system.  A vast local network of farms, scattered across the country, could better handle individual crises than the limited group of farming monopolies that now exist.

Over the last 30 years, more and more farms and meat processing plants were consolidated. Currently, about 50 factories process more than 95 percent of the nation’s beef supply. 

The raw milk industry is dominated by several large companies, who distribute their supply on a regimented distribution system that cracked under speed and scope of the pandemic. 

The glaring contrast of food waste and want has caught the nation’s attention. 

In response, President Donald Trump recently announced a  $19 billion relief package to shore up farmers and purchase their excess products.  

Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, said President Trump and the US Department of Agriculture were “standing with farmers, ranchers, and all citizens to make sure they were taken care of.” 

Up to $3 billion of the relief package was allotted to purchase fruits, vegetables, dairy and meats to be distributed to food banks and other community organizations nationwide.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, speaking at a press conference, also addressed the disconnect between food on farms that were not getting to the people who needed help most.

“This is just a total waste to me,” Cuomo said. “We have people downstate who need food and farmers upstate who can’t sell their product.”

The governor’s solution is to create a $25 million Nourish New York initiative where food banks throughout the state purchase food from upstate farmers and redistribute it to locations with need.

In East Elmhurst, Queens, one of the New York neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic, the first van loads of produce arrived on Friday, producing much needed relief to those waiting in line.

Speaking to Eyewitness News at the food distribution site, State Senator Jessica Ramos said many of her constituents were immigrants and “they are running out of cash, they don’t have money for rent, they don’t have money for food.”

The distributions will continue every Friday and Saturday at 11 a.m. as long as needed.

Meanwhile, some farms and related co-ops are donating food directly to food banks to help stem the amount of food being discarded.

The Dairy Farmers of America co-op has sent over a quarter million gallons of milk that would have otherwise been dumped to food banks.

“It’s just a drop in the bucket,” one senior executive, Jackie Klippenstein, said in a recent New York Times article regarding the donation. “But we had to do something.”

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Deported migrants wait in line for a hot meal at the Kino Border Initiative. Photo by Kelly Knaub

Rutilio Sosa Salinas is heading home.

Two weeks ago, the 31-year-old man was caught in the desert by the U.S. Border Patrol and deported to Nogales, a small Mexican town across the Arizona border. Six months ago, Salinas, who had worked illegally as a cook in Delaware for five years, risked a trip to Mexico to visit his family. He was heading back to Delaware when he was caught.

Like his father and grandfather, Salinas spent most of his life as a corn farmer in Domingo Arenas, a town in Mexico’s east-central state of Puebla. Farming paid off during the first 15 years of his career. But then a freer market forced Sosa to compete with his American counterparts, farmers using modern machinery and subsidized by the U.S. government. Eventually, things got bad.

“There wasn’t any work in Mexico,” Salinas said.

In the five years he’s been gone, things haven’t changed. “This year there isn’t anything,” he said. “Nothing.”

Salinas knows about Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law, known as SB 1070, which continues to take center stage in the national immigration debate. But Mexico’s enduring poverty and joblessness — the reason why people like Salinas leave Mexico for America — remain largely absent in the national conversation.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was enacted in 1994, proponents of the agreement promised it would create jobs, attract foreign investment and stabilize Mexico’s economy. They anticipated immigration to the U.S. would decrease.

Initially, the agreement boosted jobs at foreign-owned factories in Mexico, especially those congregated along Mexico’s northern border. But Mexico’s farming heartland was hit hard. Thousands of Mexican farmers like Salinas were unable to compete with the cheaper American produce, including corn, that flooded Mexico’s market, as cross-border tariffs on U.S. agricultural imports vanished.

The U.S. government also spends billions to subsidize American farmers each year. From 1995 to 2006, the U.S. government spent more than $56 billion on corn subsidies alone.

In all, Mexico has lost some 2.3 million agricultural jobs since NAFTA began, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico’s statistics agency.

Manuel Pérez-Rocha, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said, “There isn’t an interest by either the U.S. government or the Mexican government to carry out structural changes to the economies so that trade stops benefiting only the intra-firm trade of large corporations, mainly manufacturing companies.”

Peter Neeley, a Jesuit priest, sees the economic realities many Mexicans face on a daily basis. He helps run the Kino Border Initiative, a nonprofit shelter and soup kitchen for recently deported migrants. It’s where Salinas has eaten for the past two weeks as he prepares to trek back to his town of Domingo Arenas, some 1,500 miles away.

Neeley said that when people talk about immigration, the economics of it, they are not doing the “real hardcore analysis.” He added: “It’s costing us a lot more to detain and hold these people than it would be if we invested in Mexico, and if we cut NAFTA. If you cut subsidies out of our corn and milk and dairy products, you would change the equation completely.”

Salinas had never heard of the NAFTA agreement. He only knew that the owner of the farm he worked for all of his life could no longer profit from corn. If he had found work elsewhere to support his family, Salinas said that he would not have crossed the border in search of under-the-table employment.

“We’re only going to work. I know that a lot of jobs need us, because Mexicans are good workers anywhere, on farms, in restaurants,” Salinas said. “And it’s so we can support our families, and move forward and give a better life to our children.”

Neeley also said that most of the people at the migrant shelter wouldn’t be there if the economic situation in Mexico weren’t so dire. “Nine out of the 10 guys in here would not come if they could stay home,” he said.

Over lunch, Salinas talked about his first journey to the U.S. five years ago. He and his wife hiked for two days in the desert.

Equipped with water, food and clothing, they rested during the day and hiked through the night. Salinas said he didn’t see anyone else on the path, only the remains of a migrant who tried to make it before them. He couldn’t say whether it was a man or a woman because the body was too decomposed.

Rutilio Sosa Salina eats lunch at the Kino Border Initiative. Photo by Kelly Knaub

After making it to Los Angeles, Salinas and his wife flew to Delaware and got jobs at local restaurants. Salinas worked as a cook at a Friendly’s restaurant for five years, earning $8.50 an hour and logging 30 to 35 hours a week. He then worked an additional 30 hours a week for $7.50 an hour at Five Guys Burger for the past two years. His wife, who lived in the U.S. for three years, worked at Taco Bell.

When Salinas crossed the Arizona border two weeks ago, he traveled with four other migrants he encountered along the way. When the Border Patrol found them, Salinas said, the federal agents dumped out all of their food and stomped on it with their feet. According to Salinas, the agents yelled, “I don’t like Mexicans!”

“No one would want to be treated like that,” Salinas said. “There should be more humanity.”

After he was detained for two days in an Arizona jail, Border Patrol agents gave Salinas a pamphlet that outlined the policies of the state’s recently implemented SB1070. Then they deported him to Nogales. Salinas joined the ranks of the 282,666 other undocumented Mexican immigrants deported from the U.S. in the past year.

Despite the economic consequences NAFTA has had on rural farmers like Salinas, numbers exist showing Mexico has benefited from the trade agreement. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agricultural trade between Mexico and the U.S. increased under NAFTA from $7.3 billion in 1994 to $20.1 billion in 2006.

But Pérez-Rocha, from the Institute for Policy Studies, said that NAFTA’s success should be measured in “qualitative” rather than “quantitative” terms. “With NAFTA, trade has increased,” he said. “But it has concentrated in a few corporations while displacing thousands or millions of medium and small producers.”

Father Neeley agreed that large corporations, not small farmers like Salinas, benefit from NAFTA’s trade policies. “When you start talking about NAFTA, there’s a lot of money going into Mexico from the United States, but it’s going into the hands of a few big agricultural people, the big corporations, the owners,” he said.

Salinas finished his lunch and headed back out to the hot desert sun. Tomorrow he is heading home to Puebla, where his wife and four children await him.

“Life in Mexico is hard,” he said.

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