White House to Help Small Meat Farmers and Processors
The White House just announced a $1 billion action plan to improve fairness and competition in the meat industry. The core message is that the nation needs to break the stranglehold of a few Big Ag companies on how meat and poultry get from farm to table. That would be good both for consumers (lower grocery store prices) and farmers (higher cattle prices). (See two White House Ag Plan links below)
Previously New Rural Virginia reported on how weakening of anti-monopoly oversight by heavy corporate lobbying has led to a dramatic consolidation of the meat industry. Only four companies now control over 80% of beef processing. We reported that, while farmers have seen no price increases for their livestock in many years, profits for large corporate processors have increased dramatically, as they continue to jack up consumer prices.
This started about the time of the Reagan administration, when enforcement of anti-trust laws was substantially weakened, allowing significant consolidation in many industries, including meat processing – leaving farmers with fewer choices where to sell their product, and less and less bargaining power.
The White House plan didn’t just pop up out of the blue. In fact, the Dept of Agriculture has been working on this since at least last summer. In July, the USDA announced the outlines of its plan to fight monopolies in the farm to table marketplace and invited public comment. (See the link below to the USDA’s announcement.)
And that has resulted in an action plan that has the merit of attacking a complex problem with a multi-faceted approach, including:
1. Money to bolster existing independent slaughterhouses, to give farmers and ranchers more options in the marketplace. Our recently reported new course on meat cutting being offered by the Rapp Center for Education plays right into this need for more qualified local meat workers.
2. New financial and technological support to help new processing and distribution companies get started.
3. Increased enforcement in the food industry of existing anti-monopoly legislation. This is huge. Corporate meat processors’ prices have increased dramatically, even in covid, as consumer prices keep rising and wages and safety issues for meat workers remain subpar.
4. Support a bipartisan initiative in Congress to increase price transparency in cattle markets (where slaughterhouses have been practically dictating prices to ranchers and farmers.)
5. Change a USDA rule that for years has allowed food companies to label beef as Made in the USA if it was just slaughtered in the US, not actually raised here. (This strange rule has long allowed Big Ag to simply import more beef whenever US cattle prices started to rise, to the great loss of farmers.)
In short, these proposals could make a real difference in rebalancing the playing field between the farming community and Big Ag. But questions remain. First, will the Democrats have the discipline to see these ideas through? It won’t be easy: Big Ag will fight back hard and has well-connected lobbyists. And Republicans probably won’t help much – despite the fact that many GOP lawmakers represent rural districts, the party has long supported and received disproportionately more campaign money from Big Ag.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/01/03/white-house-beef-supply/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-action-plan-for-a-fairer-more-competitive-and-more-resilient-meat-and-poultry-supply-chain/
https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2021/07/09/usda-announces-500-million-expanded-meat-poultry-processing