If one of the only industries left in the United States is our food are we paying a fair price for our local economies? Are we paying a fair price for our meat? Some of these questions are addressed in Tom Laskawy's article below.
Killing the Competition: Meat Industry Reform Takes a Blow
"One of the least-discussed but most promising attempts at food system reform was dealt a serious blow the other day. The USDA itself eviscerated its proposed reform to a set of rules which would have given a government division with a wonky name–the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA)–authority to crack down on the way large corporate meatpackers wield power over small and mid-sized ranchers.
To say this was a lost opportunity is a vast understatement. After all, the top four companies control 90 percent of all beef processing. In the case of pork, four companies control 70 percent of the processing, while for poultry it’s nearly 60 percent. When you get that kind of market power,* abuse becomes rampant. Indeed, ranchers all around the country now agree that it’s impossible for them to get a fair price for livestock.
And it’s not just the ranchers who hold that opinion. As hard as it is to believe, back in 2008, a group of farm-state senators inserted language into that year’s Farm Bill that forced the USDA to address the unfairness in livestock markets.
The existing livestock laws date back to 1921–when the government first identified the need to level the playing field for smaller ranchers–but since then it has been observed almost entirely in the breach (i.e. not so much at all). But in 2009, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack called in reform-minded lawyer Dudley Butler to head the division in charge of livestock markets. Butler declared that he was coming to Washington ”to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.” Not fix, mind you, enforce. And some would say for the first time.
All of this effort is to halt what has been called the “chickenization” of the rest of the livestock industry. As reporter Stephanie Ogburn explained in an in-depth report for the High Country News, that we ran here at Grist, the poultry industry is run in such a way that allows single companies to own every step of the process (also known as “vertical integration”), while farmers get locked into lose-lose contracts. As Ogburn wrote:
90 percent of all poultry in the U.S. is now raised by growers who don’t own the birds or negotiate basic terms like price per pound …If anything goes wrong, as it often does, it’s the farmer who’s left holding the
Many chicken farmers these days are forced, contractually, to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in chicken houses that meet ever-changing packer specifications.
Believe it or not, the USDA’s Vilsack and Butler came through last year with strong new proposed rules to protect smaller producers that would have changed all that. The draft rule garnered support from many quarters — including the typically Big Ag-friendly American Farm Bureau–and prompted the moderate ag lobbying group the National Farmers Union to refer to it approvingly as “the Ranchers Bill of Rights.”
Of course, the rule soon came under withering assault from the meatpacking industry, which commissioned a study designed to prove that the new rule would cost a ludicrous $14 billion and 104,000 jobs. Meanwhile, no mention was made of how many jobs might be saved by the rule–cattle ranching alone has shed 650,000 jobs over the last 30 years, while the number of hog farms dropped by 170,000 between 1992 and 2004, which can only have cost jobs.
The meatpackers also convinced Congress to hold a series of hearings packed with pro-Big Ag witnesses while House Republicans attempted to defund USDA work on the rule entirely (just recently foiled by the Senate). In short, the industry was hell-bent to kill this reform. That alone should tell you how important it was."
Continue reading the full article article at Grist
http://www.grist.org/factory-farms/2011-11-09-killing-the-competition-meat-industry-reform-takes-a-blow
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