Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally

Chapter 19Supply Chain Management with Blockchain Amid the COVID Pandemic

To gain transparency and consumer safety, the food‐processing and meatpacking plants are implementing blockchain technology to their operation services.

COVID‐19 continued to wreak havoc throughout 2020, with United States meat producers being victims of the pandemic in a “cascading series of events,” including the shutting down of the food service sector, universities, and school lunch programs, all likely to impact millions of Americans.

Meat‐processing plants around the United States, which emerged as the world's epicenter of the pandemic, saw huge outbreaks of COVID‐19, as the virus spread quickly among workers crammed in close quarters, often without recommended protective gear. “After the outbreak was announced in the U.S., we never stopped working,” a meatpacking employee said. He continued: “I had to keep working without any protective [equipment] in place because I have no other means of income. But we were always afraid we might be too exposed to the virus.”

The outbreak interrupted work at meat processing plants, with workers, truckers, and meat inspectors expressing fears of traveling to hotspots. One hundred workers of the Food Safety and Inspection Service—part of the US Department of Agriculture—tested positive for the coronavirus as the illness ravaged the nation's meat‐processing plants.

Prior to the COVID‐19 pandemic's quick spread to nearly every country around the world, blockchain ...