The Biden administration will invest $1 billion in new plants and issue new rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act. Will this help bring down meat prices?
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USDA intended to buy local in its Farmers to Families Food Box program, but changed criteria to favor the lowest bidder and bigger contractors. Will the agency learn its lesson in a new round of food assistance funding?
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The Biden administration is pushing for private carbon markets but some farmers and environmentalists are wary of corporate dominance and green washing.
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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 Monday, the USDA thwarted a decade of efforts to help farmers seek justice for discrimination, retaliation, and unfair treatment by meatpackers. Trump’s USDA introduced new criteria to determine whether a meatpacker violated the Packers and Stockyards Act, after withdrawing an Obama-era proposal two years ago. This latest proposal omits several critical farmer protections from the previous rule and introduces new language that could codify abusive industry practices.
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Last week, nearly 500 cattle producers from 14 states rallied in Omaha, Nebraska to denounce corporate control over cattle markets and to demand that the Trump administration do something to fix it.
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This week, livestock farmers and advocacy groups from across the country flew to Capitol Hill to share stories of exploitation by large meatpackers and call for greater farmer protections. At issue is a pending rule by the USDA that will clarify farmers’ grounds to sue meatpackers for retaliation, discrimination, and other abusive practices.
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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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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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