The world is eating more farmed fish, and global grain traders intend to control the fish feeding business much as they control the feeding of other farm animals.
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If you care about reducing pesticide use, promoting agricultural biodiversity, and supporting small farmers, then you should also care about who’s amassing agricultural data. That’s the message of a new report from a group of sustainable food policy experts, out last week.
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European grocery chains are driving a new round of concentration in American food retail, as they race to buy up independent grocers or drive them out of business. In the most recent deal, Stop & Shop, a subsidiary of Dutch-based Ahold-Delhaize, announced it will acquire Long Island supermarket chain, King Kullen, America’s first-ever supermarket.
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Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court judge struck down Iowa’s “ag-gag” law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. The ruling concludes a 2017 lawsuit brought against the state by a broad coalition of animal rights, environmental, and community advocacy groups including the ACLU and the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
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Last month, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service announced that the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, made inaccurate and non-transparent payments during early 2018 to ranchers at its Grand Island, Nebraska plant.
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Last week, Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, a.k.a, “the Farm Bill.” While Democrats managed to evade Republican efforts to add work requirements to SNAP benefits, this Farm Bill otherwise maintains a status quo that pushes farms to get big or get out, promotes exports over supply management, and benefits agribusiness interests.
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Almost a century ago, in 1921, Congress passed the Packers & Stockyards Act to protect America’s farmers and ranchers from meat packing monopolies. Last week the Department of Agriculture quietly eliminated the independent office tasked with enforcing that law, the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). The change was the single biggest in agricultural antitrust regulation since Congress passed the original Act.
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Did you know Nestle sells 80 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin? Or that cranberry cooperatives will destroy one-fourth of this year’s crop in order to maintain fair prices for farmers? Before you sit down to enjoy your Thanksgiving feast, come prepared with some monopoly facts for the family with this Food & Power turkey day reading list. We start the list with two “classic” articles on the monopolists at your table, one by our friend Chris Leonard, and one by Chelsea Harvey of the Washington Post:
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Last week, seven corporate agriculture interest groups sued the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to halt the extension of a public comment period on a proposed mega-dairy expansion in Winona County, MN. The suit highlights broader efforts by agribusiness to silence opposition from rural residents who speak out against large concentrated animal feeding operations in their communities.
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Late last month, the Trump administration cleared the way for chicken plants to increase their processing line speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute. The change deals a blow to workers and reverses the efforts of labor and animal welfare advocates, who fought to halt poultry line speed increases in 2014. It also indicates the administration will likely soon remove line speed limits in hog slaughter and lower workplace injury reporting requirements throughout all sectors of the economy.
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Last week, after the Trump administration struck a deal with Canada and Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, the White House declared victory for US farmers, who gained greater access to Canadian dairy, egg, poultry, and wheat markets. Unfortunately, the new deal called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, also includes lesser-known provisions that could allow agribusiness corporations to patent Mexico’s native corn varieties and challenge the country’s ban on genetically modified (GM) corn cultivation.
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Farmers and farm advocates in the Carolinas are beginning to tally the full scope of damages from Hurricane Florence. Over the course of three days, 3.4 million poultry and 5,500 pigs drowned, and countless acres of cotton, tobacco, peanuts, and sweet potatoes were damaged or ruined. As of Wednesday, the USDA estimates that North Carolina growers lost at least $1.1 billion worth of farm products.
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