Elizabeth Havice, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill, has a new “Rapid Response” piece out in the academic journal Agriculture and Human Values about “Industrial Seafood Systems in the Immobilizing COVID-19 Moment.” Along with colleagues from University of Ottowa and York University (Canada), she writes about the dilemmas that an inherently international business supply chain (industrial fishing and seafood processes in Southeast Asia) faces when cross-border mobility is so constrained:
Immobilization is a key tool for containing COVID-19. Yet, mobility is a hallmark of industrial seafood systems that are an important source of food security and employment around the world. For example, tuna might be caught through the labor of Indonesian workers on Taiwanese flagged vessels that fish throughout Solomon Islands’ and Papua New Guinea’s waters; and it might be processed and canned by Myanmar workers in processing plants in Thailand, before being sold in major supermarkets globally. So what then comes of industrial seafood systems, including the workers in them, when managing the spread COVID-19 focuses on restricting mobilities? …
Industrial seafood systems are organized around continuous flow of product through global value chains (Campling and Havice 2018). COVID-19 has accelerated some flows and introduced chokepoints for others.
Find the full article – along with many other open-access pieces on food systems and COVID-19 – on the website of Agriculture and Human Values here. Read more about Prof. Havice’s work here.
