Bipartisan pair of senators want antitrust investigation into meatpackers amid plant closures
Sens. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, called upon the Federal Trade Commission to launch an antitrust investigation into the meatpacking industry. The Wednesday letter by the farm-state senators was sent after President Trump's executive order declaring, under the Defense Production Act, that meat processing plants were part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.
The meatpacking industry is controlled by only a handful of massive multinational companies that have focused meat processing into fewer and fewer plants across the nation. That has left the country’s food supply chain vulnerable to disruptions, the senators said. The shuttering of three pork plants due to the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted “in the shutdown of a staggering 15 percent of America’s pork production” at a time when stable supply chains have become more vital than ever, the letter from Baldwin and Hawley reads. “As a result, farmers cannot process their livestock — which are costly to maintain — and consumers risk seeing shortages at grocery stores, exacerbating the food insecurity that all too many Americans are currently experiencing,” the senators wrote. “These harms might have been mitigated if the meatpacking industry was less concentrated. The current COVID-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerabilities of American supply chains and the importance of ensuring that, when disaster strikes, America’s food supplies are not in the hands of a few, mostly foreign-based firms.”
Hawley and Baldwin caution that three multinational firms (Tyson Foods from the U.S., JBS from Brazil, and Smithfield from the People’s Republic of China) "control 63 percent of America’s pork processing." “The FTC has the power to shed light on these growing competition and security problems in our food supply," they said. "The Commission should ask probing questions about major meatpacking firms’ conduct, pricing, and contracting, as well as how their commitments to overseas interests impact the U.S. market and national security. Moreover, because a competitive food industry is so critical to the public interest, you should make the findings of any investigation public.”
The senators also argue that before the COVID-19 crisis, the financial effects of concentration in the American meatpacking industry have had a deleterious impact on U.S. farmers, ranchers, and consumers. "Between 1980 and 2009, the price a rancher was able to obtain per pound of beef declined from $1.97 to 93 cents (adjusted for inflation)," they said. "Likewise, between 1999 and 2008, real consumer prices for ground beef increased by 24 percent (adjusted for inflation), from a monthly average price of $1.89 a pound in 1999 to $2.34 a pound in 2008."
Over 150 of the nation’s largest meat-processing plants are in counties where the rates of coronavirus spread are among the nation’s highest, according to a study performed by USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. These facilities show over 1 in 3 of the country’s largest beef, pork, and poultry processing facilities, and although current production is stable, 2,200 meat processing workers have become infected at 48 different plants.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bipartisan-pair-of-senators-want-antitrust-investigation-into-meatpackers-amid-plant-closures