COVID Legislature is Slaughtering the Supply Chain.

High grocery demand, along with rising freight prices and Omicron-related labor shortages, is causing a new wave of backlogs in processed food and fresh produce industries, resulting in empty supermarket shelves at major stores across the country. Perishable produce growers all throughout the West Coast are paying nearly quadruple pre-pandemic trucking costs to get lettuce and berries to market before they spoil. Shay Myers, CEO of Owyhee Produce, which grows onions, watermelons, and asparagus near the Idaho-Oregon border, said he has been deferring shipping onions to retail wholesalers until freight rates fall. In the last three weeks, Myers said, transportation problems caused by a shortage of truck drivers and recent highway-blocking storms had resulted in a doubling of freight expenses for fruit and vegetable producers, on top of already-high pandemic prices. “We typically will ship, East Coast to West Coast—we used…

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U.S. Northern Border Supply Chain is Being Crippled in the Name of Omicron.

Industry insiders fear that the federal government’s vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers will exacerbate already-strained supply lines, resulting in grocery store shortages. On Jan. 10, Sylvain Charlebois, professor and senior director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, tweeted, “Ottawa’s plan to require all truckers entering from the United States to show proof of vaccination starting Jan. 15 cannot happen at a worse time,” “I’m not sure Canadians are aware of how fragile our food supply chain is right now, due to Omicron.” In mid-November, the Liberal government declared that all truck drivers entering Canada will need to be completely vaccinated by Jan. 15. Truckers had been spared from the regulation until then since they were deemed essential service providers. However, on the evening of Jan. 12, Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson Rebecca Purdy informed The Canadian Press that if Canadian…

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