Systemic Origins of Hunger Amidst Plenty During the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

As the COVID-19 pandemic strained supply chains around the world a striking, and seeming contradictory, outcome became apparent: Surges in rates of hunger in consumers occurred simultaneously with surges in food surplus and purposeful disposal. To better understand the systemic origins of this seeming imbalance, this paper develops a dynamic model of a bifurcated food supply chain, from production through consumption, based on empirical observations drawn from the popular press and industry reports form the onset of the pandemic. The model considers both the physical flow of food from farmer to end consumer, along with the processes of price discovery and corresponding economic decisions made by the producer to ship, continue to grow, or purposefully dispose of food under cultivation. The resulting model combines three methods: compartmental differential equation modeling, inventory-based price discovery, and multinomial logistic choice modeling. The dynamics generated illustrate the origins of simultaneous paucity and plenty in a food supply chain and help suggest policy interventions. Policies that help reduce the upstream inventory stresses from a sudden decrease in downstream demand, or those that increase substitutability of end consumer goods across channels, are effective at mitigating the degree of purposeful food destruction and reducing economic stresses.