Farm owners and agriculture producers will testify before the House Committee on Agriculture Wednesday about supply chain recovery and resiliency in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Watch the hearing live at 10 a.m. ET in the video player above.
Perri Cooper, executive director of the Georgia Organic Peanut Association, will testify at the hearing along with farm owners and livestock producers from the U.S. Virgin Islands; Worchester, New York; and Crawfordsville, Indiana.
After completing a review of supply chains, the Biden administration announced on June 8 that it was forming a task force to address the bottlenecks in the semiconductor, construction, transportation and agriculture sectors.
Administration officials said the goal of the review, detailed in a 250-page report, was to increase domestic manufacturing, limit shortages of vital goods and reduce a dependence on geopolitical competitors such as China.
A shortage of raw materials has made it harder for the U.S. economy to recover from the pandemic-induced recession.
The supply bottleneck has helped fuel a bout of inflation that the administration believes will be temporary, though it has provided Republican lawmakers and some economists with grounds for criticizing Biden’s coronavirus relief package.
The new task force will be led by the secretaries of Commerce, Agriculture and Transportation to focus on parts of the economy where there is a mismatch between supply and demand.
Besides the task force, the administration will take several other steps to bolster supply chains, with an effort spread across the government.
The Agriculture Department will spend more than $4 billion to strengthen the supply chain for food.
The PBS NewsHour will update this story as it develops.
