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Meat wars: why Biden wants to break up the powerful US beef industry
Source: The Guardian
Meat wars: why Biden wants to break up the powerful US beef industry
As the pandemic drives calls for a radical overhaul of the food system, can the president take on the meat giants?
Sarah Mock
Wed 25 Aug 2021 07.01 BST
Both the planet and US politics have heated up in tandem over recent decades, but few sectors have stewed in controversy quite like America’s beef industry. Four super-powered meatpackers control more than 80% of the US beef market, an extraordinary concentration of market power that the Biden administration is not happy about.
A recent executive action signed by the president aims to increase competition in the beef industry, with the White House noting that, over the past five years, “farmers’ share of the price of beef sales has dropped by more than a quarter – from 51.5% to 37.3% – while the price of beef has risen”.
But how were the big four meatpackers able to capture so much of the US beef processing capacity? They had help.
When explaining the history of consolidation in US meatpacking, it is normal to begin in the age of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. In the wake of Sinclair’s muckraking exposé on the industry of the time, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, aimed at cleaning up the meat supply for consumer health and challenging the nearly unrestricted power of these players.
Josh Specht, an environmental and business historian, offers another interpretation of this starting point. “These acts accepted the state of the meatpacking industry as of 1906,” he writes in his book, Red Meat Republic. “Big meatpacking was no longer questioned, it was regulated.”
-snip-
As the pandemic drives calls for a radical overhaul of the food system, can the president take on the meat giants?
Sarah Mock
Wed 25 Aug 2021 07.01 BST
Both the planet and US politics have heated up in tandem over recent decades, but few sectors have stewed in controversy quite like America’s beef industry. Four super-powered meatpackers control more than 80% of the US beef market, an extraordinary concentration of market power that the Biden administration is not happy about.
A recent executive action signed by the president aims to increase competition in the beef industry, with the White House noting that, over the past five years, “farmers’ share of the price of beef sales has dropped by more than a quarter – from 51.5% to 37.3% – while the price of beef has risen”.
But how were the big four meatpackers able to capture so much of the US beef processing capacity? They had help.
When explaining the history of consolidation in US meatpacking, it is normal to begin in the age of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. In the wake of Sinclair’s muckraking exposé on the industry of the time, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, aimed at cleaning up the meat supply for consumer health and challenging the nearly unrestricted power of these players.
Josh Specht, an environmental and business historian, offers another interpretation of this starting point. “These acts accepted the state of the meatpacking industry as of 1906,” he writes in his book, Red Meat Republic. “Big meatpacking was no longer questioned, it was regulated.”
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/25/meat-wars-why-biden-wants-to-break-up-the-powerful-us-beef-industry