As meat packing plants close for coronavirus, will prices spike and shelves go empty?

More and more meat packing plants are closing as coronavirus continues to spread across the United States and kill workers at facilities hit with outbreaks.

Smithfield Foods announced closures of plants in Missouri and Wisconsin on Wednesday after previously closing a facility in South Dakota.

In Colorado, the death toll from an outbreak at the shuttered JBS meatpacking plant increased to four this week while a Cargill facility had its first known fatality, though it remained open, according to state data.

Two Tyson Foods workers died after an outbreak of nearly 150 cases at a closed plant in Iowa, the company confirmed to WCNC.

Additionally, meat plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Canada have halted production, Reuters reported.

On Friday, Tyson Foods confirmed the deaths of three employees who worked at a plant in Georgia and a fourth who had a job outside the facility, the Associated Press reported. The plant has remained open, according to the AP.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” Smithfield Foods CEO Kenneth Sullivan said in news release announcing the South Dakota plant closing. “It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running.”

Should you stock up on meat?

Experts say the loss of production has so far been offset by meat stocked up in cold storage, according to The Associated Press. Additionally, companies are sending meat previously intended for now-closed restaurants to grocery stores, the AP reported.

But experts warn extended closures could change that because individual plants account for a large amount of production.

“You could shut multiple plants down for a day or two, and we’ve got wiggle room to handle that,” Kansas State University agriculture economist Glynn Tonsor told AP. “But if you took four or five of those big plants ... and they had to be down for two weeks, then you’ve got a game changer.”

If anything, the plant closures will mean fewer options on grocery shelves, not a loss in the total amount of available meat, Christine McCracken, an analyst of animal protein financial services company Rabobank told CNN.

“There likely will be a drop in the number of types of products that are on the shelves,” she told CNN. “It may be that a deboned product isn’t available because they don’t have the labor to do that. So boneless chicken breasts might not be an option in the coming weeks.”

Meanwhile, the price that farmers can sell their products for is being driven down, AP reported. That could mean higher prices in the long term if farmers go out of business, therefore decreasing the supply, CNN reported.

Is meat safe in the coronavirus pandemic?

No evidence suggests food or food packaging transmits COVID-19, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

“Foodborne gastrointestinal (GI) viruses, like norovirus and hepatitis A, can make people ill through contaminated food,” according to the FDA “SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is a virus that causes respiratory illness.”

However, industry trade groups and unions worry about safety, raising concerns that workers be supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE).

“The federal government must make PPE available for our industry so that major supply chain disruptions can be avoided,” Betsy Booren, a senior vice president of grocery store products industry trade group Consumer Brands Association, told The Hill.

Meat companies say they’re taking extra precautions to protect employees from catching coronavirus. Smithfield, Tyson and Cargill all have announced measures to test temperatures, additional cleaning and sanitizing and promoting social distancing.

Yet advocates argue it hasn’t been enough.

“This is so shortsighted and really unfathomable,” Debbie Berkowitz, worker health and safety program director at the National Employment Law Project, told The Hill. “This isn’t rocket science. Now workers are sick. Its spreading like wildfire through the plants and into the communities and they have to shut the plants down.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 3:35 PM with the headline "As meat packing plants close for coronavirus, will prices spike and shelves go empty?."