Our Unfolding Food Emergency
This article is excerpted from the Autumn Harvest Season 2023 issue of Plenty Magazine. We present the initial portion of the article. You may then link to Plenty’s website to read the remainder of the piece, and see the charts and photos that accompany it.
The Montgomery County Council was uniquely visionary in 1980 when it protected 90,000 acres, nearly one-third of the county, for agricultural purposes. Now is the time to create more opportunities in the Agricultural Reserve for robust food production.
Stepping into a supermarket in 2020 or 2021 was a surreal experience—and wearing masks was only one reason. Empty shelves glared out at us. Where were the neatly shrink-wrapped packages of chicken? Why were there no eggs to be had? Peanut butter was in short supply, as were coffee and milk. There were many factors behind these shortages, but according to the Center for Strategic Studies, “The U.S. Food supply chain is highly efficient with low levels of redundancy, meaning that a small disruption in one part of the system can have cascading effects and cause food shipments to be delayed by days or weeks.”
Covid-19 showed us how precarious our food supply really is—and serves as a foretaste of what our climate-impacted futture may be. Our region supplies less than 5% of the food we eat;everything else travels from hundred to tens of thousands of miles to reach us, making us vulnerable to far away and more frequent disasters.
Recent floods in California—which produces more than half of U.S. fruits, nuts and vegetables—drowned many acres of produce. Drought this year and last in the Midwest and Great Plains has hurt pastures and corn—which feeds much of the nation’s cattle, driving meat costs higher. Last year’s hurricanes continue to affect this year’s citrus crop in Florida. Georgia lost its entire peach crop this year to a late spring frost. Recent catastrophic flooding in Vermont and western Massachusetts destroyed crops across that region. Extreme heat across Texas and the Southwest means that many fruit trees and vegetable plants cannot pollinate, and therefore cannot grow fruit. Beehives are melting in Arizona. Our own Eastern Shore—indeed the entire Delmarva peninsula—is facing loss of more farmland to saltwater intrusion. And of course, there’s all the food we import from other countries, many of which are also suffering withering heat and wild swings between drought and floods.
Even though food prices have fallen in recent months, because of these climate-driven shortfalls, food price inflation is still out-pacing overall inflation. “Overall, grocery prices were 5.8% more expensive in May 2023 than in May 2022,” according to a CNN Business report.