Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced 10 new appointments to an independent committee advising food safety and inspection policy.
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In a few weeks, many Western sheep ranchers might not have a place to slaughter their lambs. Global meatpacking giant JBS last month won the bankruptcy auction for the Mountain State Rosen (MSR) lamb processing plant in Greeley, Colorado.
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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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A whistleblower from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division testified before Congress last week that Attorney General William Barr had disproportionately directed antitrust enforcement resources to scrutinize relatively small mergers between cannabis firms out of a personal dislike for the industry.
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A shrinking handful of corporations and cooperatives control a growing portion of global dairy production, to the detriment of rural communities and the environment, argues a new report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).
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A group of farmers and ranchers last week joined the leading meatpacking workers’ union to demand greater protections for meatpacking workers, acknowledging a shared fight against mistreatment by large meatpackers in the wake of COVID-19.
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A report released last week by Real Food Generation exposes new details about a secretive system of kickbacks between Big Food corporations and cafeteria operators.
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Meatpacking plants have become national hot spots for the novel coronavirus.
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COVID-19 has upended America’s food supply. With the loss of big buyers in restaurants and school districts, farmers without a place to sell their foods are dumping milk, tilling crops back into the ground, and euthanizing egg-laying hens.
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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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Agribusiness wants to dramatically change the way farmers value and pay for a bag of corn seed, to get a second bite at producer profits. Bayer, the world’s leading seed manufacturer, has been piloting an “outcome-based” pricing program that adjusts the cost of its seeds or agrichemicals based on how well its products perform. Farmers and antitrust scholars worry that goliaths such as Bayer will use this data-driven pricing program to further squeeze farmers and to lock more growers into the behemoths’ product bundles and digital agriculture platforms.
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