{"id":477642,"date":"2022-01-20T14:31:22","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T14:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=1b3171b6bb65273440f700d383b3b7e3"},"modified":"2022-01-20T14:31:22","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T14:31:22","slug":"omicron-supply-chain-disruptions-are-hitting-low-income-communities-the-hardest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/20\/omicron-supply-chain-disruptions-are-hitting-low-income-communities-the-hardest\/","title":{"rendered":"Omicron Supply-Chain Disruptions Are Hitting Low-Income Communities the Hardest"},"content":{"rendered":"\"A<\/a>

Over the past few weeks, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has swept the U.S., supply chain woes have worsened.<\/p>\n

Three things seem to be happening: the first is that so many workers are now out sick that delivery systems to grocery stores and retailers are starting to break down; in other words, the produce has been harvested, but in many instances it\u2019s stuck in warehouses, or on ships, or in food silos because of a shortage of people to speedily deliver goods around this huge country. That, combined with a slew of tough winter storms across the U.S. in recent weeks has, retailers report, snarled truck traffic<\/a> and caused delivery backups. Related to this, primary products are making it to processing facilities, but those facilities have so many workers out sick that they can\u2019t keep up with demand to make processed foods, such as soups and cereals.<\/a> The result? Empty shelves in grocery stores. Food chains are reporting they are out of as much as 15 percent<\/a> of their stock at the moment, significantly higher than is usually the case.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean Americans are about to go hungry as grocery stores empty out — the food distribution system in the U.S. is more resilient than that, and has an awful lot of redundancies built in — but it does mean food choice options are declining at the moment, and food prices are likely to continue their upward march at an even faster pace. This will, of course, be a burden carried disproportionately by the poor: a large-scale study<\/a> by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2016 found that low-income families in the U.S. spend between 28 and 42 percent of their pre-tax income on food; by contrast, wealthier families spent considerably less than 10 percent of their income on food.<\/p>\n

The second thing is that so many retail workers are sick that stores simply don\u2019t have the staffing resources<\/a> to fully stock their shelves while also catering to their usual numbers of customers. Many, including big-name stores like Walmart, Apple and Macy\u2019s, have responded by reducing their hours and\/or cutting back on services. Some grocery stores are reporting that up to 8 percent<\/a> of their workers are now out sick on any given day as the nationwide Omicron surge nears its peak.<\/p>\n

The third contributing factor to the empty shelves being reported around the country is a more fundamental global supply-chain breakdown as the world enters the third year of the pandemic. Countries that had hoped to be far beyond lockdowns by 2022 are back to attempting to control the spread of the virus through the crude instrument of shuttering large parts of their economies and ordering people to work at home where possible. China — whose Sinopharm vaccine<\/a>, including its booster shot, has been peculiarly outplayed by the Omicron variant — is locking down entire cities still, affecting tens of millions of people<\/a>. As a result, key parts of the international supply chain, which is disproportionately dependent on Chinese factories, are particularly fragile at the moment. Asia analysts predict that the supply chain could come under unprecedented pressure<\/a> over coming months if Omicron starts spreading in Asia at the speed that it has already spread through the U.S. and Europe, and if China continues to enforce its \u201czero-COVID\u201d policy, which relies on locking down whole cities and mandating universal testing if even a single case of the virus is picked up by health authorities. Lock down enough cities simultaneously and it\u2019s inevitable that factories will also have to temporarily cease operations.<\/p>\n

“The same capitalist system that moved production out of the U.S. to China to make more profits thereby required long global supply chains to feed production in China and bring the products back to U.S. markets,\u201d Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, tells Truthout<\/em>. \u201cBut long supply chains are more vulnerable to disruption than short ones.\u201d<\/p>\n