© Kilito Chan/Getty ImagesAustralians are being warned there could be meat shortages within two weeks. File image.
The meat industry says it's now an emergency, with hundreds of workers forced into COVID isolation.
In some supermarkets, meat shelves are completely bare, emptied by a perfect storm of holiday shortages and the COVID effect.
The big grocery chains such as Woolworths and Coles say the stock is often there - the problem is getting it into stores, because COVID is causing high absentee rates among retail staff and distribution workers.
Comment: It bears repeating: Covid is not responsible, they admit as much, these people isolating aren't even sick, this is solely due to the nonsensical, and tyrannical, government enforced restrictions.
"We do expect the supply chain issues will continue for at least 12 months," Retailers Association' spokesperson Fleur Brown told 7NEWS.
"However, they are critical at the moment.
"They will ease a little as we get over the Omicron curve."
Comment: That's assuming the establishment don't use another variant (and there's enough to choose from) to justify further fearmongering and restrictions.
'Emergency' situation
Meat Industry Council CEO Patrick Hutchinson has called it an "emergency" situation right now.
"We're now seeing a large amount of meat workers who actually can't get to work," he said.
"There's hundreds and hundreds of staff up and down the eastern seaboard, certainly QLD, NSW and VIC who aren't able to get to work at this stage."
He's also calling for rapid COVID tests to keep meat workers on the job or risk meat shortages within two weeks.
"We want to be making sure we're rapid antigen testing all workers on a daily basis on site to manage the food supply chain," he said.
That means there could be no lamb on the barbecue for Australia Day.
"This is a strong possibility unless we get these settings in place," Mr Hutchinson said.
"People are going to suffer, and at this stage it's consumers."
Comment: Suspect organisations, like the WHO and the World Economic Forum, will be relieved, because they've tried all manner of ways to behaviourally engineer consumers out of meat consumption for years now: Plant-Based Profits: The Corporate Interests Behind the Push Towards Veganism
Unions say transport operators on the docks have lost up to half their workforce due to COVID impacts.
Truckies say they should be given testing priority, with RATs flowing freely - and free of charge.
Mr Hutchinson said a lot of meat workers live together, so if one gets COVID, they must all isolate.
"I'm actually concerned we will have a shortage because we just won't have the people on site over the next month to six weeks to be able to process anything," he said.
He's called on the prime minister and state premiers to come to an agreement on who can get priority rapid antigen testing.
"Otherwise this will be the time when we will see food shortages in this country.. especially around meat because there just will not be the people able to process them."
Comment: Similar supply issues and shortages have been looming across much of the planet, and for much the same reason, lockdown restrictions. What has also become clear is that these backlogs have a much greater impact than just immediate food shortages, they ripple through the supply chain causing farmers to go out of business, or scale back operations because healthy animals are culled and sent to the dump, and in turn this means that there's even less to go around the following year.
It's likely that the situation will be much worse than simply '12 months of supply chain issues', because governments are making little effort to resolve the problems - that, less we forget began during the lockdowns of 2020 - and crop failures, livestock outbreaks, inflation and government mismanagement of agriculture have yet to be taken into account:
- UK farmers face cull of 150,000 pigs after lockdown creates backlog of 'disastrous' proportions
- Lockdowns, panic buying, low supply: Beef prices surge to unprecedented levels
- Ongoing global bird flu outbreak sees France cull over 600,000 poultry in 1 month, 180,000 projected losses in Czech
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