[New post] Agriculture Supply Chain Completely Breaks Down
User ID posted: " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaymjFWY5_c Agriculture Supply Chain Completely Breaks Down by Neil McCoy-Ward Agriculture Supply Chain Completely Breaks Down I covered last week how the jobs crisis was affecting different Countries. The UK's s"
I covered last week how the jobs crisis was affecting different Countries.
The UK's story however is quite different to that of the rest of the world. As well as having to deal with strict lockdowns over the last year, it's also still adjusting to its new position in the world following the most publicised and hostile of breakups: Brexit!
The UK's current worker shortage is far more broad reaching and is affecting all levels of employment across all corners of industry. Employers are finding it extremely difficult to fill vacant positions at all levels across manufacturing, construction, hospitality, logistics and distribution, health and social care, and agriculture.
An estimated 1.3 million non-UK workers have left the country during the pandemic. There are also far fewer foreign workers seeking employment in the UK, with overseas interest in UK jobs more than half from before the pandemic; indicating that UK employers can no longer rely on overseas workers to plug employment gaps.
In a sign of the growing pressure on companies, surveys from the British Chambers of Commerce showed 70% of businesses that had tried to hire staff in the three months to June had struggled to do so.
This leads me to the first bottleneck: Agriculture
Brexit has meant an end to free movement of people within Europe or more specifically in this case: labour. Leaving food and farming sectors exposed to a huge shortage of seasonal and casual workers which have traditionally been filled by EU nationals.
EU workers who usually come to the UK to carry out jobs such as livestock & crop picking and packing, now struggle to meet the criteria required under the Government's new points-based system.
Farmers across the UK are in panic mode as the busiest season of the year just started but they are faced with a shortage of hundreds of thousands of European workers.
"95 per cent of all fruit and produce picked and packaged in this country is done by eastern Europeans,"
DELIVERY: The haulage industry has been one of the most seriously affected sectors in many countries due to struggling to find enough heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers to keep the economy moving. HGVs transport just about everything around the country – and makes up for around 90-95% of all goods
But thanks to a combination of COVID, lockdowns, Brexit and other factors, there aren't enough drivers to meet demand. Based on a survey of its members, the Road Haulage Association estimates there is now a shortage of more than 100,000 drivers in the UK alone.
Many of these drivers were European and they went home during COVID, most never to return.
The pandemic has also created a large backlog in HGV driver tests, so it's been impossible to get enough new drivers up and running. The haulage industry said that there were 25,000 fewer candidates passing their test in the last year.
But there's one final problem which is adding to this burden at both the delivery and shelf stacking level to get that food onto your supermarket shelf...
Pingdemic: A more unusual and unique phenomenon that has temporarily stalled the UK's road to recovery is the emergence of the 'Pingdemic'
A record number of people who had downloaded the UK Government track and trace app were being pinged and told to self isolate for 10 days for the most bizarre of reasons! The app uses Bluetooth technology to identify other users.
The 'Pingdemic', has produced huge disruptions for businesses and critical services. The consequences of so many people isolating has been devastating
Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction to Rotting Crops 02:41 - Empty Shelves In Supermarkets 04:56 - Why The UK Worker Shortage is so Severe 06:14 - How COVID is Affecting Migratory Workers 07:20 - Will The Food Chain Collapse? 09:07 - The Agriculture Crisis 10:35 - The Transport Crisis 14:50 - The Pingdemic Crisis 17:40 - My Closing Thoughts
DISCLAIMER This video is for entertainment purposes ONLY & designed to help your thinking, not direct it. These videos shall NOT be construed as tax, legal or financial advice and may be outdated or inaccurate; all decisions made as a result of viewing are yours alone.
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See Full Video Transcript Below
Hi I'm Neil McCoy Ward and in today's video we're going to be looking and understanding while the crops this is hundreds of thousands of tons of crops from fruit to vegetables are just being allowed to rot in the fields whilst at the same time supermarket shelves in a number of locations are running dry they're running empty of these much needed food supplies
-Documentary Clip Starts-
On this one farm there are three quarters of a million unpicked courgettes (zucchinis) 150 tons worth of vegetables that have simply been left to rot that's because they can't get the staff and if this continues it will force farms like this one to make difficult decisions about their future. Did you suspect that this might happen I think that we thought that there was a possibility but what we didn't see was how extreme it would be I think it's the extremities of the reaction of people to it I think that's what has taken the business by surprise
-Documentary Clip Ends-
As economies around the globe begin their journey on the long road to recovery a number of industries in particular in the food industry is left scratching their head and asking why are we still having all of these supply chain breakdowns and issues why are supermarket shelves empty and also why are we suffering the phenomenon known as shrink-flation this is where the packaging is the exact same size everything looks identical but the product inside has shrunk by as much as 50% in some instances. In today's video we're going to focus on just that why are there so many problems from farm to processing to packaging delivery and then finally getting stocked on your local supermarket shelf now no country in the western so I'm talking about the developed world right now is suffering this worse than the United Kingdom and this is for a number of reasons which don't apply to some of the other countries number one is the worker shortage from Brexit so these are the Eastern European mainly workers that would come in who are now no longer coming in number two is of course the ping-demic which is a very interesting subject especially if you're not in the UK you probably won't have heard of the ping-demic and number three is the truck driver shortage due to again Brexit and also the Covid crisis where a lot have gone home so we're going to get into all of this and break all of this down. Welcome to the show if you get your news from alternative places like I do you'll know that there's a lot of talk at the moment of food shortages and shelves being empty especially in holiday destinations now the mainstream media are not covering any of this I haven't seen it on any mainstream platform any you know news outlet I haven't seen in any newspapers or anything like this but if you go onto sites such as Facebook and Twitter which I don't use a lot but you know they are useful for some things you will notice that a lot of holiday makers are posting photographs of large supermarkets that are just empty, mainly in the fresh produce section: the vegetables, the fruits, they are just empty now if you step outside of the UK and you look at the EU European Union main news outlets they are making all these stories up at the moment and saying the UK you know has got their just rewards for you know voting for Brexit and now they've got no food, they've got no workers, they've got no immigration and that you know the economy is going to just collapse this is what the you know a lot of these EU mainstream news outlets are saying but is this strictly true? Well if you listen to the UK mainstream media they're not talking about the food shortages but they are talking about the staff shortages and they are saying that this is just a temporary blip, everything's going to be fine in a couple of months, all the workers are going to come back etc. Personally I think they're both you know distorting the truth a little bit, I don't think either of those are true I definitely do not think that all of the European workers are going to be coming back anytime soon and if you look at where we are now in August this is the prime picking season for many crops so I don't think this solution is going to be ended this year. I covered in last week's video how different sectors have been absolutely decimated from bars to restaurants cafes, the hospitality sector in general has just been decimated in the last 18 months. Now the UK's worker shortage is far more severe than other nations with 70% of employers saying they simply cannot hire for the sort of work they're doing now a lot of this is known as low skilled work, I don't quite agree with this terminology but this is where someone is required to go to a college do some sort of a vocational training that could be someone that works with their hands it could be some sort of engineering, I definitely don't see how they call this unskilled work personally but that is their definition of it and they're saying that because many of the colleges and all the vocational trainings were closed last year this has caused a huge backlog with a lot of people simply not coming in that would have this year on top of all the people that left all the different industries last year so this is only compounded the problem, now if we look at the sector's worst hit by this it says it is manufacturing, construction, hospitality, logistics, distribution, health and social care and agriculture. Hi if you're getting value from this video so far can you do me a quick favor just click the like button why not subscribe and leave me a comment, I love to read your comments and see what you think. UK employers are also saying that the bottlenecks are being caused by added complications as fewer EU workers are being permitted to travel into Britain via all the Covid regulations and quarantining. If you think about the quarantine in the UK if you're coming from a red country no one is going to pay this you know just a couple so you know a husband and wife for example on their kids if they were coming in the cost alone could be 10,000 pounds just to get through the hotel quarantine I mean this is just you know not going to happen, why would someone go from their country, I mean how much of their salary just on the quarantine alone and they're saying that because of this they can no longer rely on overseas workers to plug the employment gaps now the problem with this is that 90% to 0.95 of some of the agriculture and the packaging plants are made up of European workers, so this is causing a huge problem. And it's not just the business sector you also have the British Chamber of Commerce you have the Federation of Small Businesses they are all raising the alarm right now on this labor shortage and they are calling on the government to do more about it, many organizations are pointing the finger and saying the government is really doing almost nothing about these labor shortages and they are not lifting any of the regulations to allow these workers to come in and some are even claiming that there could be a complete collapse of the food chain supply system if things don't change within the next year. Now I think that's a little alarmist myself because really if you think of supply and demand what I think will happen personally is not a collapse of the food system but they will simply start importing it from overseas crops will come from other European nations as well as elsewhere in the world.
–News Clip Begin-
British supermarkets will look to the EU to fill their empty shelves
–News Clip End-
And of course you now have to factor in the transport costs and the import duties all of this will simply push up the price of food in the long run we're already seeing inflation just ravishing through the economy yeah and this isn't just the UK we're talking about United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand all the developing nations are being ravaged by inflation now you look at the developing nations so these are not your western nations, the inflation on food in the last year has been absolutely devastating some nations up 300%, so you think how bad it is right now with food inflation what it is double digits imagine having food inflation at 300% right now. So this leads me on to the first problem area which is agriculture, so it's stated here that EU workers that usually come to the UK to carry out jobs such as livestock and crop picking and packaging as well now struggle to meet the criteria required under the government's new point-based system. Farmers across the UK are in panic mode right now as this is the busiest season of the year it's just started but they're faced with a shortage of 95% of vegetables and fruit pickers to actually pick and package this season's crop. 95%! Can you imagine this
–News Clip Start-
0.6% of seasonal agricultural workers in the UK are British, 0.6%, almost everyone else is Eastern European and what would you say then to the politicians in Britain who are making those decisions. I hope they make the right decision and let us come back to work here. Without staff we don't harvest the crops if we can't harvest the crops, we're going to stop planting the crops that means that, business disappears and that means those crops disappear from the supermarket shelves so it's pretty straightforward I think
–News Clip End-
And this isn't all now you have the delivery problem as well so the haulage industry is calling this a national crisis most HGV drivers which stands for Heavy Goods Vehicles were also Eastern European and during the crisis over the last year and a half the majority of them almost all have gone back to their home countries and are now finding it almost impossible or extremely difficult to get back to the UK to do their job again, so most have already taken up new positions in their home countries and do not expect to return to the UK again. Now if you think about the UK for example 90% to 95% of all goods are transported by HGV trucks so Heavy Good Vehicles these drivers again mainly Eastern European now you also have to think about the demographics and the age now the average age is around 55 years old for HGV drivers in the UK. Now a lot of people are not coming into this industry it's not as desirable as it once was a long time ago and even with wages being pushed up and sign-on bonuses and all sorts of things even if this was to work the industry is saying the problem now is at a governmental level with the testing centers simply not letting people do the training and the tests due to the Covid lockdowns, they're saying it is a health risk. So last year alone they're claiming that 25,000 drivers that should have come through actually didn't get through, the backlog is now getting bigger and bigger and a lot of those people that were on the waiting list have simply gone into other industries such as construction and other industries like this. Now this has caused an even bigger bottleneck and they do not think this is going to be resolved for at least 3possibly even 4 years before catch-up comes along. Now I have another theory on this I agree with what was just stated there but I also think if you look at the advent of AI and Automated Driving now trucks, automated trucks have been tested now for at least five years if not seven or eight years so I think just when the sector might start to recover a lot of those jobs will be taken over by driverless vehicles, AI and other software again we can talk about the picking as well I think again robots will probably come in to start doing picking, packaging, you just look at amazon some of these big fulfillment centers, robots are doing packaging this actually could be a very negative situation with all the lockdowns has now caused another crisis and that is the crisis of the advent of increasing the speed of AI and production, because where this was gradually coming in a lot of companies now are saying look I can't go bankrupt what other choices do I have? Let's get in AI let's get in robots and other things like that to replace the workers, so I think this has only accelerated a crisis that was going to be coming anyway and now will be coming a lot quicker, just my personal opinion. The other thing contributing to this lack of workers right now in the HGV field, the transport field, is that you have to think many of these truck drivers were working overtime for the last year and a half to make up for many of the other drivers that that were off sick or simply were too afraid to work now all of these drivers now at summertime are saying look I need a break I need to take a holiday I need to take a week or two off go to the coast go to the beach something like that and actually have a break, so this is also contributing to the bottleneck that we're seeing. And for those of you fast food lovers out there even Colonel Sanders this week rang the alarm bell and said that you may not be able to get some of your favorite chicken when you go to your local restaurant due to shortages, but if all of this wasn't enough there is also one other crisis effect in the UK which is a pretty crazy one I've got to admit and that is the ping-demic, no not pandemic, ping-demic not sure what that is let me explain. A record number of citizens in the UK and we're talking huge numbers who had downloaded the NHS so the National Health Service app for coronavirus were being pinged at all sorts of strange times of day with warnings that they may need to self-isolate and they had come into contact with people who had tested positive for Covid so many were told to self-isolate for 10 days yet again. Now the app actually uses Bluetooth technology so this is where it gets a little bit weird one of my neighbors told me that she was pinged because one of her neighbors tested positive so somehow I don't know how but the app thought that the virus could have gone through two brick walls to get to her house so she was told to self-isolate, a little bit unusual but this is you know what the app was doing so you may think that's strange what about this one, a man was in the supermarket last week and he was pinged and told to self-isolate why because someone else that had been in that supermarket in the few days prior had tested positive for Covid. Now you've got to think about this logistically how many people go into a supermarket on a day-to-day basis? It's thousands some of the big ones it's tens of thousands, now if just one person test positive and they've been in there on that one day how many days are you going back are you going back a week, are you go are you going back a few days? That could be a huge amount of people that are now being pinged and told to self-isolate now here's the knock-on effect what if you were one of those people that was in the supermarket and you got pinged and now you're thinking well that was a few days ago I've been to see my mother, my brother ,my sister, I went to school, I went to this place, I went to that place, now what happens do all those people get pinged as well you can see the impact this is having what about the people going for a walk in the park or walk down the you know down a path and they pass someone and the Bluetooth picks up that you've passed someone that's tested positive, ping, there you go again, so this pandemic has been absolutely devastating on the UK economy especially for workers you hear stories all the time one of my friends works in a school she's a teacher and she said that she's been at home more than she's been at school teaching at the moment because someone from her class gets pinged or someone from another class who was you know playing with these kids and now she's been told to self-isolate, this is just a nightmare situation for the UK economy. So at the start I said I would explain why all this food is rotting in the fields, why we're having shrink-flation in packaging, well here's the reason why let's summarize: The workers are just not there because they are back in their home countries some farms are down 95% on staff and even if they could get the staff they're being pinged and told to self-isolate the packages are just not there either because they are also from European countries the Heavy Goods Vehicle delivery drivers are short-staffed they can't even get through training a lot of them are back in their home country and now in the supermarkets all the staff are being pinged from the ping-demic and told to stay at home is it any wonder that the food is rotting in the fields and we're getting food imported from other countries right now, this is a crazy situation and personally I don't see how the media and the government can keep putting out all these positive spin stories about how the economy is booming and how we're growing and all of this sort of stuff. Think about this logically just use some common sense here for one second, how could the economy be doing better now than it was last year or even 2019? Let's use that example how could the economy be growing at a rapid rate for you know the fastest in x amount of years when you look at how it was in 2019 and we were very stable very steady and you look now with all the closures and the business collapses and all the currency printing out of thin air think about this logically it just doesn't make sense sometimes you've got to use common sense with these things and stop looking at the mainstream media and their statistics just look and apply common sense and you'll see the truth for yourself. Thank you so much for watching today please click the like button if you haven't already consider subscribing and comment below what do you think of what's going on right now I'd love to hear your thoughts until next time take care God Bless, see you soon.
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