COVID-19: Why Chennai's new lockdown rules are impacting its meat supply

The reason for panic-buying and hoarding in Chennai, despite a largely orderly nationwide lockdown since March 25, is a set of new rules issued by the state government, surrounding movement of vehicles and availability of groceries.

The government has said that regular grocery stores would not be allowed, and no movement of private vehicles would be allowed, without a government-issued pass. In Madurai, several motorists thronged the district collector’s office to secure their vehicle passes.

Not surprisingly, the panic-buying has resulted in stocks running out at several grocery and meat stores across the city. “For the first couple of weeks of the nationwide lockdown, we saw nearly 75 percent disruption to the supply chain, which impacted business. This had normalised in the last couple of weeks but this new lockdown with a new set of rules, has caused more problems," said Nishanth Chandran, founder and chief executive officer of meat retail chain, Tendercuts.

Like many meat retailers, Tendercuts ran out of stock on Saturday after day-long panic-buying. "A total of 8,000 orders in 30 minutes were registered on our app yesterday," Nishanth added, "We are all out of stocks today, and won’t be open for the next four days of the new lockdown."

What has caused some degree of impact to the meat business is that the closure of stores now means another interruption in the supply chain, which Nishanth says could take two days post-lockdown to recover. According to the new government rules surrounding the local lockdown, only home-delivery of cooked food is allowed. No home-delivery of meat is allowed.

As a result of the spike in demand for meat, local butcheries have seen a sharp rise in prices of mutton. While the more organised retailers are selling the meat at Rs 900 to Rs 1,100 per kilogram, smaller meat shops are pricing mutton at upwards of Rs 1,300 per kilogram.

A scarcity in chicken supply has also hit the local market. "We managed to sell all our chicken by 1:00 pm on Friday itself," said Abdul Kareem, a local meat trader, "We won’t be doing business for the next four days and haven’t placed any new orders from our suppliers. It will take time till May 1 for the next bunch of supplies to come through, once the new lockdown ends."

The situation has been exacerbated on account of an already existing shortage in sea food in the Tamil Nadu market, since local fishermen have not been venturing out to sea. With the city’s "intense" lockdown all set to come into effect from Sunday, indication is rife that the availability of meat will continue to stressed even as prices continue to steadily mount.