6 minute read
Logistics in the age of Covid
By Rine Mansouri
In the early months of 2020, it was extremely common to see headlines such as “Coronavirus wreaks havoc on supply chains“ in the news, explaining how the novel Covid-19 pandemic could be affecting the thing that was most dear to you.
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For most of us living in the west, during the early months of 2020, the pandemic’s effect could be felt mostly through the impact it was having on imported goods from China and the surrounding region rather than being of any medical or epidemiological concern. The virus seemed so far away, almost as something otherworldly. Shipments of clothes ordered from Zara that once took 2 weeks now suddenly seemed forever lost in transit, away somewhere stuck at sea or in a shipping container docked at Guangzhou.
As the epidemic spread out to become a pandemic, people in the west soon realised that having their shipment of clothes delayed was the least of their problems and that, even basic commodities taken for granted could potentially be in danger of running out.
Take for instance the situation with pharmaceutical drugs last spring where headlines in Sweden appeared warning about dangerously low supplies of Alvedon. News like this helped create a sense of panic and led to hoarding of basic medical supplies, in turn exacerbating the issue.
How is the lack of Alvedon connected to Covid-19? The substance in Alvedon is called Paracetamol, and the bulk of it worldwide is produced in China and India. Sweden receives most of its supply of paracetamol from the latter country. In the beginning of March, India decided to ban exports of medicines because they could not get the raw materials necessary to produce the drugs from China. Hundreds of the factories that produce generic drugs are located in the provinces of Hubei and Zhejiang, areas that were heavily affected by Covid-19.
It is also interesting to note that Sweden in the 1990’s privatized and disassembled its vaccine production capacity and infrastructure, most of the production was moved to India.
The issue of shortages and delays in supply chains led to calls for protectionism, of questions being raised about why most of the countries affected cannot produce their own hand sanitizers or medical equipment. More importantly, there were questions being asked about why so many countries in the western world cannot seem to produce basic commodities and why they have to import most of it from abroad.
These differences in a state’s capacity to produce seemingly basic goods are not related to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is rather a matter of political economy and the distribution of political power between countries and within a country.
The mood was different early on in the pandemic, the western world looking on with a sense of smugness and indifference to the initial outbreak, with Liubomir Topaloff writing in The Diplomat (March 04, 2020) and wondering if this was the moment when the Chinese regime would collapse. But when instead of a collapse, we saw an amazing recovery by China, the response by western commentators was a mixture of anger and envy.
The way that China, and the other East Asian countries, have dealt with the containment and rebounded economically, lead some to wonder why the western countries´ response to the pandemic was so lackluster and toothless. The East Asian countries seem dynamic and able to marshall the productive forces of society for the greater good while in the west, the state seems weak, lethargic, and unable to cope with the basic functions of a government (take for instance how the US and the UK have handled the pandemic and the ensuing fallout from it).
The intricacies of world trade are so complex and abstract, making it difficult for us to fully comprehend it, one can be forgiven for thinking that the products we order online just magically manifest in front of our doorsteps. Of course, there are people involved at every stage of the process, there is an entire network of workers, infrastructure, and technologies that make the circulation of goods possible.
With all the inputs and little things that have to happen in order to put food on our table (the coal that makes the steel, that goes into the tractor, that goes into… and so on and so on), we cannot possibly know about the labour conditions for all of the people who worked to put breakfast on our tables.
David Harvey, a geography professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) used to start his classes off by asking the students: “Where does your breakfast come from?”
The first answers would invariably, semi-seriously, be “Well I got it from the store”, but then Harvey would push back and ask “Well no, come on, go back a bit further than that. Where does your breakfast come from? And what do you know about the people who produced it?” and people would generally be unable to answer in any great detail. And by the time this practice had gone on for weeks, his students would respond to the question with “Stop asking me! I didn’t have any breakfast this morning”.
Aside from being a funny little anecdote, it also potentially reveals an underlying sense of guilt about the way we consume things and how we would rather not be too aware of the dark reality beneath the surface.
As satisfied consumers in the west who enjoy all the cheap t-shirts, sneakers, and toys that come our way from the far east, we tend to forget or actively ignore how these products are made in factories in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Indonesia by people working in often appalling and miserable conditions.
We speak of long hours and low wages as a thing of the past, the Manchester of Charles Dickens time, but in Asia, the ‘worlds factory’, that is the reality, front and center.
China, however, is more than just the factory of the world, it has also become a logistics empire. Having the world’s largest container and crane manufacturers, China is now the third largest ship-owning country and the second largest shipbuilding country after Japan as well. The rise of China as an economic powerhouse has led to geopolitical tensions, the recent trade war between China and the US has not just become a question of unfair trade policies but also about resources and tech supremacy (in semiconductors and chips).
As Deborah Cowen writes in her brilliant book, The Deadly Life Of Logistics,
The use of violence and militarization works as the lubricant in what makes supply chains tick and function, there is a huge military apparatus at work securing the flow of goods and making the oceans safe for commerce and transit.
Logistics, both military and corporate, are intertwined, entangled and dependent on each other. One can take a look at Iraq and Afghanistan where private military companies are contracted to do much of the feeding and housing of troops. In Iraq for instance,there were more soldiers belonging to private military contractors, such as Blackwater, than there were regular US military personnel.
Today, roughly a year after the pandemic took shape, shortages are still a problem, but this time for different reasons. Demand is rising everywhere and there is not enough supply available to meet the demand. There is a global shortage of shipping containers and of semiconductors, affecting carmakers and smartphone manufacturers. The vaccine rollout is being affected as well by disruptions in the supply chains, creating a bottleneck that could hinder and delay the recovery from Covid-19.
