Vox - How Biden Can Rein in the Big Meat Monopoly

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Program manager for food and agriculture systems, Claire Kelloway, discusses why the meat industry is bad for farmers, workers, consumers, animals, and the environment.

Shortly after President Joe Biden took office in January, a coalition of some 30 groups made a push for a cause that flew under the radar: curbing the power of Big Ag.

The signatories, which included familiar groups like farmer advocates, labor unions, animal welfare groups, and environmental organizations, called on Biden to issue an executive order banning food industry mergers, at least until stronger antitrust rules are in place. (Disclosure: The Open Markets Institute, where I work, was one of the signatories.)

The effort to shine a light on Big Ag is indicative of a broadening movement to stop the rapid consolidation of food production. It’s also part of an emergent anti-consolidation mood on the left. Antitrust policy has reemerged as a progressive priority over the past few years, though much of that focus has generally been on breaking up and regulating big banks or Big Tech.

There’s a case to be made that Big Ag — and more specifically, Big Meat — should join that list. As author and business reporter Chris Leonard said at a recent Yale Law conference, “concentration in agriculture is only important to people who eat, otherwise it’s a trivial matter.”

How we produce meat has profound implications for people, the environment, and animals. Big Meat corporations operate on an industrial model of animal agriculture that drives farmers off the land, injures workers, traps billions of animals in horrid conditions, pollutes rural drinking water, and in some states disproportionately sickens rural communities of color. Big Meat justifies this destruction under the banner of cheap meat, all while allegedly working together to actually raise prices for consumers.

To be sure, some of these problems existed in the livestock industry 50 years ago, back when we ate less meat and the industry wasn’t dominated by just a few companies. But the rapid expansion and consolidation of the meat industry since the 1970s has translated into immense political power, earned in part by giving out millions to politicians each year and maintaining a revolving door between the federal government and industry (two-thirds of meat industry lobbyists are former government employees). In fact, Tom Vilsack — who headed the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for both of President Obama’s terms, and was just confirmed to return to the post as Biden’s agriculture secretary — was a dairy industry lobbyist during much of the Trump presidency.

This revolving door has resulted in legislation and regulatory policy that leans heavily in the big meatpackers’ favor. In fact, early in the pandemic, President Trump signed an executive order to keep slaughterhouses open — and that executive order was drafted by a meat lobbyist.

Obama made major promises to tame meatpackers’ power, but as agriculture secretary, Vilsack failed to make headway in the face of industry pushback. The Biden administration now has a chance to move where Obama faltered — but with Vilsack returning, food-focused activists are skeptical.

Taking on Big Meat wouldn’t just help consumers, farmers, and meatpacking workers; one poll found 82 percent of independent rural voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports “a moratorium on factory farms and corporate monopolies in food and agriculture,” so it could also help halt Democrats’ losing streak in rural areas and heartland states.

As progressives take their campaign against consolidation into a higher gear with a friendlier administration in power, Big Meat needs to be on the priority list.

What exactly is “Big Meat”?

When you roam the meat aisle, you’ll see a wide variety of brand names, but chances are good that most of them are owned by one of the just six companies that control two-thirds of all US meat production: JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, Smithfield, Hormel, and National Beef.

The meat industry is even more consolidated today than the early 1900s, when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and President Woodrow Wilson broke up and regulated the powerful and manipulative Meat Trust, the handful of companies that dominated the market at the time. These progressive-era reforms worked for some 50 years to establish fairer and more competitive livestock markets. As recently as 1977, the top four companies in each industry controlled just 25 percent of cattle, 31 percent of pork, and 22 percent of chicken processing.

But that all changed in the late 1970s, when judges and legal scholars adopted a new, radically conservative antitrust doctrine that gave corporations more cover to buy up their competitors. The former president of Tyson Foods, Don Tyson, told Leonard, the business reporter, that their motto was to “expand or expire — buy your competitor or go out of business.”

In addition to direct competitors, meat corporations such as Tyson bought up or drove out companies all along the meat supply chain, from feed manufacturers to livestock breeders. Altogether, this decimated independent, local businesses that kept money circulating through rural communities and funneled wealth to a handful of corporate headquarters instead. Today, the top four corporations in each industry slaughter 73 percent of all beef, 67 percent of all pork, and 54 percent of all chicken.

Over this period, meat production became much more industrial, and meatpackers used their growing power to push the farms they bought from to consolidate as well — to go big or go home. This precipitated an explosion in factory farms, dramatically expanding the chicken industry and shifting pork and beef production to fewer, larger farms.

For example, from 1997 to 2012, the number of pigs on factory farms has gone up by more than a third and the average hog farm has grown by 70 percent — but nearly 70 percent of hog farms have gone out of business in recent decades. In one decade, the number of cattle-feeding operations in the largest 13 cattle states dropped by 40 percent as the average operation size increased 13 percent. Today, about 9 billion animals live in terrible conditions on American factory farms, producing some 100 billion pounds of meat a year, and all closely controlled by just six meat conglomerates.

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