Betsy E. Huber: Agricultural workers are not receiving vaccines as scheduled by the CDC

Bare shelves, food limits in grocery stores and food chain supply lines backed up across the country.

That is what can be expected if agricultural workers do not receive vaccines in a timely fashion.

Sadly, it doesn’t take much effort to imagine this outcome – in fact, we got quite a preview about a year ago as the pandemic began its long grip, severely disrupting the supply chain and leaving many Americans to wonder what was next.

To protect our food supply chain, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security explicitly listed agricultural workers as essential in its April 2020 memorandum. While the list was advisory and not technically a directive, it emphasized the important services that Americans depend on daily and the safety measures that could be used to protect those serving in a role “critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.”

Despite the recognition of the importance of agricultural workers when the food shortage occurred, these individuals are still undervalued and undervaccinated.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes them as essential and places them in a category reflective of that, placing them in Phase 1b to receive their vaccine, each state ultimately makes its own determination – and most have determined our agriculture workers, our food chain supply and ultimately a nation of hungry citizens should be bumped down the line.

States like Iowa, Indiana and Ohio have divided Phase 1b into tiers and are placing agriculture workers below where recommended by the CDC and Homeland Security. Others like Maryland and Oregon have removed these workers altogether from this phase. For those frontline workers in our farms and fields in Minnesota, there is no plan at all – they are only vaccinating Phase 1a individuals and have provided little information as to when or in what phase ag workers will be able to receive their vaccines.

In the agriculture industry, social distancing can be hard to maintain, and many agriculture workers stay in shared housing or use shared transportation vehicles or restroom facilities with suboptimal options to reduce potential virus transmission. Though efforts have been taken to reduce the risk, each of these factors directly increase workers’ susceptibility to contracting COVID-19. Given that the food industry is experiencing dramatic labor shortages, protecting individuals who remain must be a priority as they are key links within the food supply chain.

The more we postpone vaccinations of agricultural workers, the more vulnerable our nation is to another food shortage. We must call on the Washington state Legislature and Washington State Department of Health (DOH) to advance agriculture workers to their recommended status with other essential, front-line workers as we cannot risk an integral part of our economy or a hungry nation.

Betsy E. Huber is president of the National Grange Foundation.