Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights that we exist in a global community. From a single city, it spread to 188 countries across the world and infected 30 million people by September 18, 2020. Decades of modeling pandemics predicted potential consequences, but COVID-19's impact on the food supply chain, and specifically livestock production was unexpected. Clusters of cases among workers in meat processing plants evolved quickly to affect human, animal, and environmental welfare in several countries. In processing plants, the hygiene focus is on product quality and food safety. Because of their close proximity to one another, COVID-19 spread rapidly between workers and the lack of sick leave and health insurance likely resulted in workers continuing to work when infectious. In the United States (U.S.) many processing plants shut down when they identified major outbreaks, putting pressure especially on pig and poultry industries. At one point, there was a 45% reduction in pig processing capacity meaning about 250,000 pigs per day were not slaughtered. This resulted in longer transport distances to plants in operation with extra capacity, but also to crowding of animals on farm. Producers were encouraged to slow growth rates, but some had to cull animals on farm in ways that likely included suffering and caused considerable upset to owners and workers. Carcass disposal was also associated with potential biosecurity risks and detrimental effects on the environment. Hence, this is a One Welfare issue, affecting human, animal, and environmental welfare and highlighting the fragility of intensive, high-throughput livestock production systems. This model needs to be re-shaped to include the animal, human, and environmental elements across the farm to fork chain. Such a One Welfare approach will ensure that food production systems are resilient, flexible, and fair in the face of future challenges.
Highlights
The emergence of a novel pandemic disease should not have taken the world by surprise
The 2009 swine flu pandemic infected about 61 million and killed an estimated 284,000 [2]. Both pandemics were H1N1 influenza viral diseases and it is perhaps natural that the focus for predicting future pandemics was on influenza, with a Web of Science search for “pandemic AND prediction” showing that 290 out of 415 articles since 2010 include “influenza” [e.g., [3]] whereas only 15 include “coronavirus” [e.g., [4]]
We focus on the United States (U.S.) as it is one of the hardest hit countries so far where related data are readily available and accessible
Summary
The emergence of a novel pandemic disease should not have taken the world by surprise. The limits on line speeds were raised by waivers from the USDAFSIS, again likely increasing worker stress and injury risk, and with potential impacts on animal welfare (stunning effectiveness) and food safety. Pigs are selected for increased growth rates but the fact that the birth-to-slaughter time period is 24–28 weeks and is a multi-stage process, means the industry is slightly more flexible compared to broiler production. At the time of writing, there are no reports of mass depopulation in the E.U. but the need for carcass disposal at scale could change with continuing closures of meat processing plants. Other reported environmental concerns include water pollution/deoxygenation and the accumulation of the associated compounds in plants and animals [83] the extent to which these are potential problems associated with its use in mass depopulation of poultry is unknown. It represents an enormous waste of the finite resources (land/feed, water, and fossil fuels) that went into producing those animals and birds in the first place
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
