A congressional report reveals how meatpacking corporations exaggerated risks of food shortages and drafted an executive order to keep their plants open, deterring health and safety regulations.
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Last week, a group of organizations representing meatpacking workers filed a civil rights complaint with the USDA against dominant meatpackers. The Title VI Civil Rights Act complaint alleges that Tyson Foods’ and JBS’s response to COVID-19 had a disproportionately harmful, disparate impact on their employees of color.
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While the country grapples with the COVID-19 crisis, USDA food safety officials have been making decisions that could further sicken Americans and threaten frontline food workers.
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Wholesale beef prices have jumped to record levels, as shoppers stockpile meat in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. But this run on beef isn’t helping cattle ranchers. On the contrary, cattle prices have plummeted since January, putting many ranchers on the brink of collapse.
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On Tuesday, several Midwestern feedlot owners along with the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF) filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that dominant meatpackers conspired to depress cattle prices starting in 2015. The case argues that JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef strategically cut back on open market cattle bids, closed plants, and imported costly foreign cattle in order to force farmers to accept lower prices and manipulate spot market cattle values.
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A coalition of animal rights groups, environmentalists, food safety advocates, farmers, and media organizations won two major victories against ag-gag laws early this month.
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Dairy Farmers of America, the largest dairy processor in the country, recently threatened to terminate its contracts with around 900 independent dairy farmers in the Northeast. Farmers in the region say this move is yet another step from DFA to undermine independent producers and to suppress earnings for farmers in the dairy market.
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Today, most chicken farmers are growing their animals on contract for huge meatpackers, a system that some farmers call "worse than sharecropping." The Obama Administration promised to investigate how concentration in the chicken industry was negatively impacting farmers. But then, mysteriously, their investigation disappeared. What happened?
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