Pushback against Big Ag's drive to monopolize the US food supply
Mark Crispin Miller
COVID-19 is Laying Bare How Big Ag is Taking America’s Small Farmers to Slaughter
As the door for greater consolidation across industries opens wider, entrenched transnational food interests are feeling the heat from American farmers and ranchers to curb their monopolistic dreams.
May 27th, 2020
There is a bottleneck in the nation’s food supply chain. Specifically in the meatpacking operations of the country’s “big four”: Tyson Foods, National Beef, Cargill, and Brazilian giant JBS – the world’s largest processor of beef and pork products. The logjam has been exacerbated by a slew of coronavirus outbreaks in Iowa meatpacking plants and several other plants across the United States, but the real problem seems to lie with big ag’s penchant for unfair antitrust practices and monopolistic designs.
In a protracted battle against the powerful industry that dates back a hundred years, the latest salvo emerged out of Kentucky last week when that state’s Commissioner of Agriculture, Ryan Quarles and Attorney General Daniel Cameron called for the Justice Department to “undertake and investigation into the potentially illegal anticompetitive practices by some meatpackers in the cattle industry.” Their jointly issued letter to the DOJ was motivated by grievances from Kentucky cattle farmers who claim the price they are being paid for their animals has dropped between 30 and 40 percent as the pandemic-induced shortfalls in production send beef prices sky-high.
Some economists, like Kansas State University’s Ted Schroeder, believe the current problem is the logical result of supply and demand forces, saying that there is “plenty of cattle” to go around and that challenges lie in getting them “through the system.” This position is, of course, shared by the companies that are under fire, like Tyson Foods, which published an open letter in the Washington Post and the New York Times back in April, warning that the shuttering of production facilities due to COVID-19 would severely impair the ability of farmers to sell their livestock.
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