Strawberries at Christmas: an image that epitomizes consumer fantasies from the global food supply chain. Hidden behind the haze of food supply "magic" is the reality of increasingly pressured resources relying on global flows of container shipping and air freight. A fraught and sometimes fragile system that brings us Chilean blueberries, Mexican avocados, Argentinian blackberries, sugar snap peas from Zambia and roses from Kenya.

Food retailers and consumers have become used to a settled landscape, a global network that has kept moving, based on predictable demand and familiarity when it comes to the direction of flows of goods. We’ve become confident that we’ll always find what we’re looking for on the store shelves.

The biggest shock and the biggest lessons for food supply chains have obviously come from the COVID-19 pandemic. The global crisis resulted in a huge dislocation of the system and an ongoing legacy of disruption, displacement and uncertainty. The foundations of that settled picture of supply chains have been moved around or have fallen apart.

During the height of COVID-19, societies around the world were limited by lockdowns in their spending on foods, in restaurants and other food outlets. There was lower demand for foods combined with a decline in availability because of affected logistics and lack of staff. In turn, farms and producers were limiting their operations and cutting back on unnecessary costs. There were even campaigns to encourage people to eat crops that would otherwise go to waste — Belgians were encouraged to eat more fries to tackle the potato mountain.

Read the full article about food supply chains by Richard Wilding and Emel Aktas at GreenBiz.