Fasten Your Seatbelts
It looks like the food supply chain is is starting to show serious stress from the long-term consequences of the lockdowns of early 2020. However, it's important to distinguish empty shelves from temporary local supply chain disruptions from shortages caused by system-wide strain.
Local disruptions are usually the result of an emergency (often weather-related) disrupting the ability to bring food to local retailers, and in a wider sense is a result of the shift to just-in-time systems (and the consequent confusion of slack with fat. The system-wide stress we are beginning to see is the result of the loss of significant parts of the 2020 crop of numerous kinds of agricultural products when the lockdowns significantly reduced demand for food in the supply chain for restaurants, school and workplace cafeterias, etc, while greatly increasing demand in the supply chain for grocery stores.
Because so many farmers have long-term contracts with one or the other supply chain, the ones on the aggregate supply chain were legally constrained from pivoting to sell to the individual supply chain -- and even if they could have, the individual supply chain couldn't ramp up fast enough to absorb the additional food. As a result, farmers had to destroy the unsellable food to make sure it didn't rot in the fields and become a health hazard -- and as a result a significant part of the 2020 harvest was lost.
This meant that the 2021 harvest was playing catch-up -- and hasn't quite been able to close the gap. Which means that things will be difficult until the 2022 harvest starts rolling in, and even then it may take some time to get things back to anything resembling normal. Worse, there's no guarantee that we'll be caught back up enough that we won't have further problems during this period next year.
This suggests that people who are where they can garden would be wise to put in as big of a garden as they can manage this year.
Local disruptions are usually the result of an emergency (often weather-related) disrupting the ability to bring food to local retailers, and in a wider sense is a result of the shift to just-in-time systems (and the consequent confusion of slack with fat. The system-wide stress we are beginning to see is the result of the loss of significant parts of the 2020 crop of numerous kinds of agricultural products when the lockdowns significantly reduced demand for food in the supply chain for restaurants, school and workplace cafeterias, etc, while greatly increasing demand in the supply chain for grocery stores.
Because so many farmers have long-term contracts with one or the other supply chain, the ones on the aggregate supply chain were legally constrained from pivoting to sell to the individual supply chain -- and even if they could have, the individual supply chain couldn't ramp up fast enough to absorb the additional food. As a result, farmers had to destroy the unsellable food to make sure it didn't rot in the fields and become a health hazard -- and as a result a significant part of the 2020 harvest was lost.
This meant that the 2021 harvest was playing catch-up -- and hasn't quite been able to close the gap. Which means that things will be difficult until the 2022 harvest starts rolling in, and even then it may take some time to get things back to anything resembling normal. Worse, there's no guarantee that we'll be caught back up enough that we won't have further problems during this period next year.
This suggests that people who are where they can garden would be wise to put in as big of a garden as they can manage this year.