Farm Action Fund’s Joe Maxwell was featured in a recent New York Times opinion piece, A Good Reason for Rural Rage: The Crushing Power of Corporate Meat. Journalist Farah Stockman dove into how the largest meatpacking corporations have used their outsized market power to crush America’s farmers and ranchers for too long, and rural Americans have grown frustrated with decades of politicians enabling this corporate abuse.
She also highlighted polling by the Rural Democracy Initiative, which found 88% of rural voters in battleground states say they would be more favorable toward a candidate who supports “cracking down on meat processing monopolies and ensuring local businesses can compete.”
The Biden-Harris administration has made significant strides toward doing just that, but there’s more work to be done. Farm Action Fund’s policy platform for candidates and elected officials provides a roadmap for the next administration to rein in corporate control of our food system and empower producers to feed their communities.
The Biden-Harris Administration Paved the Way for a Fairer Food System
As Stockman explains in her opinion piece, the current administration has taken historic action toward dismantling corporate meatpackers’ stranglehold on our food system and returning power to farmers and ranchers. Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has followed through on many recommendations from our 2020 transition document for the incoming administration — which was a playbook for the agriculture directives included in President Biden’s Executive Order on Competition.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has rolled out new rules strengthening the over 100-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act (P&S Act) to better protect farmers and ranchers from the largest meatpackers, in addition to finalizing the long-awaited “Product of U.S.A.” rule so American farmers and ranchers can distinguish their products from mislabeled imported meat sold by multinational corporations.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has dealt several blows to dominant meatpackers under the current administration. In 2022, the DOJ cracked down on dominant poultry companies for cheating and abusing poultry farmers. One year later, in 2023, the DOJ also brought a civil case against agriculture data and analysis company Agri Stats for orchestrating a price-fixing scheme across the meatpacking industry. Agri Stats provided competitively sensitive information to dominant poultry and meat processors — like Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield — essentially creating a virtual setting for these dominant corporations to increase retail prices, drive down the price paid to producers, and increase their profit margins across the industry.
Just as important as these steps to level the playing field for producers, the Biden-Harris administration has worked to rebuild a system that benefits everyone. Over the past four years, the USDA has made several rounds of investments in local and regional meatpacking plants to provide producers with more options and bring competition to an industry dominated by the largest corporate meatpackers. Most recently, the USDA made a commitment to leverage government food procurement dollars to support local and regional farmers and ranchers, not just the world’s largest food corporations.
How the Next Administration Can Go Further to Crack Down on Dominant Meatpackers
Regardless of the election outcome, Farm Action Fund will work to ensure the next administration adopts more strategies to level the playing field for livestock and poultry producers from our policy platform.
First, the next administration must put an end to rampant corporate price gouging, which Farm Action has documented in the meatpacking, fertilizer, and egg industries. Multinational corporations in these sectors and others have reaped record profits off the backs of farmers and consumers under the guise of supply chain disruptions since the pandemic. Vice President Harris recently proposed a plan to implement a federal price gouging ban and to crack down on corporate food industry mergers. In response, Farm Action Fund led dozens of other farm groups, labor groups, faith groups, anti-poverty groups, and academics in sending a letter of support for her proposal.
In order to uplift America’s livestock producers, the next administration must reform government checkoff programs to prevent producers’ checkoff dollars from being funneled to corporate trade and lobby groups that work on behalf of the largest meatpackers. Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling must also be reinstated to help U.S. producers distinguish their products from imported meat, and the USDA must finalize its remaining rules to strengthen the P&S Act.
Finally, the next administration must continue and further empower vigorous antitrust enforcement to combat unprecedented levels of concentration throughout our food and agriculture system. Providing our antitrust enforcers like the Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ with the resources and tools they need to do their jobs effectively is critical to building competition and holding corporations accountable.
Read our full policy platform here.
Written and edited by: Jessica Cusworth, Christian Lovell, and Emma Nicolas. Concept developed by Angela Huffman and Joe Maxwell.
