The Future of Food on the Ballot: What to Expect in a Harris or Trump Administration

Photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Next week’s Presidential election will have profound implications for food policy. Based on the two candidates’ track records and campaign promises, here’s what to expect.

Donald Trump’s Agricultural Agenda

Donald Trump’s commitment to mass deportations of undocumented immigrants would upend farm communities. More than 85% of U.S. agricultural workers are foreign-born and an estimated 45% are undocumented. As President, Trump targeted meatpacking plants with immigration raids.

Trump’s promise to raise tariffs would also hit U.S. agriculture. During his administration, his imposition of tariffs set off a trade war that badly hurt many farmers. To mitigate the damage, Trump authorized $61 billion in emergency bailouts for farmers. Recently, the National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association estimated that another trade war could cut U.S. soybean exports to China in half, costing farmers billions, and called on policymakers to “maintain a trading relationship with China.”

Trump has rarely spelled out his broader farm policy positions. One exception is his response to a candidate questionnaire from the Farm Bureau, in which Trump promised to cut taxes and regulations, promote ethanol and farm exports, and improve crop insurance.

Trump’s actions while in office suggest that he’d side with agribusiness interests in a second term. As President, Trump signed an executive order to keep meatpacking plants open during the COVID-19 pandemic drafted by Tyson Foods’s legal department. The Trump administration rolled back environmental regulations and appointed former Georgia Governor and grain marketing business owner, Sonny Perdue, to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Perdue swiftly walked back efforts by President Obama’s USDA to protect livestock farmers from retaliatory, abusive, and deceptive treatment by large meatpacking companies. This included withdrawing two out of three proposed Packers and Stockyards Act rules and rewriting the third to favor meatpackers.

Perdue also demoted the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration, which enforces the Packers and Stockyards Act, from an independent office within USDA to a program of the Agricultural Marketing Service. This move stripped agriculture competition enforcers of some autonomy.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into price manipulation by beef packers. However, his antitrust enforcers approved several large food business deals, including Bayer-Monsanto, Dean and Dairy Farmers of America, and Amazon-Whole Foods.

Complicating predictions for farm policy under Trump is his relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump mentioned that he could give Kennedy a place in his administration that oversees health and food policy. As a part of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, Kennedy promised to reduce agricultural pollution and pesticide use and promote small-scale, regenerative farms, running counter to Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

Kamala Harris’s Agricultural Agenda

One of the Harris campaign’s central food policy promises is a federal ban on price-gouging by food businesses. The policy would apply to food manufacturers and grocery chains that raise prices above their increased cost of doing business to increase profit margins, particularly in times of crisis. Harris has also said she would secure more authorities for state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission to “investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.” Finally, she has promised to support smaller food businesses and “crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions” to make the food sector more competitive.

Earlier this month, the Harris-Walz campaign addressed agriculture in a two-page rural policy memo. The document touts the Biden administration’s investments in meatpacking capacity and farmer loan relief and reiterates a commitment to challenge large mergers in the food sector. It also references bills that Harris introduced as a Senator to institute heat protections for farmworkers and end farmworkers’ exemptions from minimum wage and overtime laws. In their responses to the Farm Bureau’s candidate questionnaire, Harris-Walz campaign representatives also promised to maintain federal crop insurance subsidies and money for climate-smart farming methods and rural renewable energy projects.

The Biden administration will leave some agricultural antitrust work for the next administration to pick up. Biden’s antitrust enforcers took legal action against food and agribusiness giants such as Cargill, Koch Foods, Syngenta, Corteva, AgriStats, John Deere, Kroger, and Albertsons. Except for the cases against Cargill and Koch Foods, all these suits or investigations remain ongoing.

Despite early concerns that renominating Secretary Tom Vilsack would stymie action against big agribusiness, the Biden-Harris USDA has slowly made progress on rules to better protect livestock farmers from deceptive contracts and abusive treatment under the Packers and Stockyards Act. While the agency has finalized two such rules, it has two more proposals to finish, and two more future rules in the works. Earlier this month, USDA promised future rulemaking on cattle pricing and meat merchandising practices, but the bulk of the work to draft and enact these rules would fall on the next administration.

Harris’s campaign provides some assurance that she would pick up this work as President. She otherwise does not have much of a track record in agriculture policy to indicate how, or if, she’d stand up to the status quo. As attorney general for top agricultural producer, California, Harris didn’t weigh in much on farm issues aside from defending state laws to ban the sale of foie gras and require all eggs sold in California to come from free-range or humanely raised hens. In the Senate, she primarily advocated for wage and safety protections for farmworkers.

There are some reasons to worry about Harris’s willingness to stand up to corporate power. One of Harris’s large donors, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, as well as her campaign surrogate, billionaire Mark Cuban, both called on Harris to replace the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, and roll back the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust agenda. Harris has close ties to Silicon Valley: her debate advisor is leading Google’s defense in an antitrust case, her brother-in-law is chief legal counsel for Uber, and her fundraisers are dotted with several other Big Tech lawyers. Advocates worry that she’ll walk back antitrust challenges to Big Tech, in particular.

What We’re Reading

• The Department of Labor is investigating Tyson Foods and its contractors for potentially hiring minors as young as 11 to work the night shift in an Arkansas packing plant. (Arkansas Times)

• Author Ted Genoways makes a compelling case for breaking up monopolistic meatpackers. (The Food & Environment Reporting Network/The Washington Post)

• A new investigation reveals just how challenging it is for U.S. farmers to find seeds that aren’t coated in bee-killing neonicotinoids. (Civil Eats)