Sheldon (Xiaodong) Du, an associate professor of agricultural and applied economics, received $650,000 in USDA-NIFA funding for his project Understanding the meat supply chain network: The impact of supply disruptions on food insecurity and nutritional inequality through Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s (AFRI) Foundational and Applied Science Program. It was among 41 projects sharing nearly $22 million in funding.

Project summary (from CRIS website): The meat supply chain network is essential to US food security, linking livestock producers, meat processors, grocery stores, and retail consumers. However, the meat network is vulnerable to shocks, as recurring large-scale food safety recalls and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic revealed; and when this happens, certain US populations become disproportionately at risk of food insecurity. This may lead to serious short- and long-term consequences for nutrition and health.Our proposed project attempts to understand the underlying structure and vulnerability of meat supply chains as well as the economics of supply chain formation so as to quantify the consequences of the market crisis on food insecurity, and to facilitate the design of sound policy responses. We will employ the Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) dataset of the US Census Bureau to construct supply chain networks (SCN) for selected meat products, e.g., beef, pork, poultry, and seafood. With constructed SCNs, we will quantify economic impacts of supply disruptions and income shocks related to the market crises; specifically, impacts related to meat product quantities and prices. Census of Manufactures and IRI retail and household scanner data will be employed. Also, we will quantify the impact of meat supply chain disruptions on food insecurity and nutritional consequences to the US population, and examine whether nutritional inequities result.