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chamerionwrites https://chamerionwrites.tumblr.com/post/636523873860567040/rather-than-indicting-the-presidents-of-the-five :

Rather than indicting the presidents of the five corporations named in the FTC report, however, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer entered into a landmark consent decree, compelling the meat companies to divest from other food sectors as well as from supporting industries along the supply chain. Congress subsequently passed the Packers and Stockyards Act https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/packers-and-stockyards-act, legally enshrining that agreement. The arrangement held for 50 years. “From 1920 to the present date,” concluded a study https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-history-review/article/changing-patterns-of-concentration-in-american-meat-packing-18801963/277B9CEDD8750F15BC9263340C0BC026 of deconcentration in the meatpacking industry in 1971, “limited ability to use anti-competitive forms of conduct” caused the largest companies “to lose market shares continually to regional firms in a process that can and should be called market competition.” Over that same period, conditions and wages improved considerably for meatpacking workers, livestock farmers and ranchers received increased prices, and the cost of food for consumers actually went down relative to hourly wages. But at precisely the moment that the study appeared, the systematic effort to unravel antitrust measures was beginning.

That transformation was rooted in a philosophy of intentional agricultural overproduction advocated by Earl L. Butz https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/13/archives/why-they-love-earl-butz-prosperous-farmers-see-him-as-the-greatest.html, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture. Butz embraced deregulation and market concentration as a way to prop up industrial-scale agriculture, in order to artificially depress food prices worldwide—a strategy aimed at increasing American soft power on the world stage. In short order, the federal government went from policing food trusts at home to running an international food ring, intended to undercut our Communist competitors. Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fortified this system in the 1980s, when it loosened standards for approving mergers under the 1920 consent decree. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cargill, Inc. v. Monfort of Colorado, Inc https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/479/104/. that demonstrating a “price-cost squeeze” for farmers or even collusion between packers did not constitute an antitrust monopoly unless their market share were large enough “to succeed in a sustained campaign of predatory pricing” such that, per the established antitrust standard, competitors “actually are driven from the market and competition is thereby lessened.”

The effect of these initiatives to tighten top-down market control of the U.S. food supply is hard to overstate. In 1972, there were nearly 3,000 packinghouses operating in the United States. Twenty years later, that number had plummeted to fewer than 200. At the start of the Reagan administration, there were roughly 600,000 hog operations nationwide. Twenty years later https://www.pork.org/facts/stats/structure-and-productivity/number-of-u-s-hog-operations-by-year/, there were only about 80,000 left. And those who managed to hold on were often in desperate shape. By 2001, an estimated 71 percent of chicken farmers were at or below the poverty line. Eventually, those farmers started filing antitrust suits under the Packers and Stockyards Act, and the 2008 Farm Bill required federal regulators to revisit the standards for antitrust enforcement in the food economy. The DOJ and the USDA held joint hearings https://www.justice.gov/atr/events/public-workshops-agriculture-and-antitrust-enforcement-issues-our-21st-century-economy-10 and proposed rule changes to make it easier for farmers to sue over anti-competitive practices and antitrust market advantages. But the meat and poultry industry successfully lobbied to remove language from the rule about price-fixing, and Congress defunded implementation of the change through an appropriations rider—and has repeatedly done so ever since. Only when the Organization for Competitive Markets https://competitivemarkets.com/, a livestock farmer advocacy group, filed suit against the Trump USDA did the DOJ finally agree to investigate unfair practices and undue influences in the meat industry before the end of 2020.

Then came the pandemic. By the middle of March, meat-packers across the country were seeing more and more of their workers calling in sick. Employees, too, were noticing fewer cars in the parking lot and gaps on the production line. But nearly 80 percent https://cepr.net/meatpacking-workers-are-a-diverse-group-who-need-better-protections/ of frontline meatpacking jobs are occupied by immigrants, refugees, or people of color. Because more than half are non-native English speakers, union meetings and newsletters have been replaced with informal networks in dozens of different languages; word of changes to their work routines often travels slowly. Packing companies strongly discourage line workers from missing days for injury or illness, and line jobs are among the most dangerous in America, so even under such pressure, work absences are far from uncommon https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-factory-workers-lost-more-time-injury-and-illness-2018-2019-3. Besides, most Midwestern and Southern states, where packing plants are concentrated, still had fewer than a handful of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the early spring, so at first no one paid much attention to co-workers with a cough or a low-grade fever. During the week of March 16, however, Midwestern governors began instructing public schools to close https://madison.com/how-midwestern-states-are-responding-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/collection_dc52bef3-a22b-57e8-839a-6f033a873a43.html#1. Workers with children suddenly had to find daytime childcare, and many also began hearing from their kids about social distancing.

That same week, Smithfield Foods chief executive Kenneth Sullivan sent a heated letter https://www.propublica.org/article/emails-reveal-chaos-as-meatpacking-companies-fought-health-agencies-over-covid-19-outbreaks-in-their-plants to Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts. Smithfield employees, Sullivan wrote, “work in close proximity to each other and are increasingly asking one question: ‘Why are we here?’ This is a direct result of the government continually reiterating the importance of social distancing.” Sullivan asked that the governor’s future communications be “carefully crafted to exclude agriculture and food industry workers.” He also insisted that “government leaders, at all levels, have to understand social distancing is a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops.” If Ricketts didn’t specifically “call out” food production as an essential industry, he maintained, then there was a high risk that Smithfield employees would “stop showing up for work,” pushing the whole country to “the precipice of a major societal disaster.”

Had Smithfield begun installing dividers between workstations and issuing personal protective equipment (PPE) to its employees early on instead of contesting the need for social distancing, it might have saved its workers considerable harm and severely curtailed community spread in several Midwestern states. Instead, on April 8, more than 80 Smithfield workers in the plant in Sioux Falls tested positive https://apnews.com/b1680e580f0b5d60f7bde08c96217cfc. The company announced that it would close down within the week, but over those next few days, the number of confirmed cases climbed and climbed, from 80 to 190 to 238. By the time Smithfield finally shuttered the plant in mid-April, it had become the top Covid-19 hot spot in the country, with a cluster of 644 confirmed cases https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/15/cdc-sioux-falls-smithfield-foods-becomes-largest-coronavirus-hotspot-us/5138372002/ among its employees and people who had been in contact with them. Workers told the BBC that the rapid spread would have been preventable had Smithfield not ignored employee requests for PPE, not insisted that sick workers remain on the line, and not withheld information about the spread of the virus at its facilities. At the time, Smithfield claimed that masks and other PPE had been difficult to source because of “the stress on supply chains.”

In reality, the relevant stresses on the supply chain were created by Smithfield management. Over the decades-long deregulatory turn in the meatpacking economy, the big packers have exploited a whole array of incentives to create artificial bottlenecks in the middle of a large and complex supply chain, in order to maximize efficiency and profit. This means, among other things, that even brief disruptions in production can lead to catastrophic effects on either side of the logjam. Sullivan warned Governor Ricketts that temporary shutdown orders “could lead to social unrest” due to food shortages. “It will be a calamity,” he said. Ricketts clearly took the warning to heart. When asked about the prospect of closing meatpacking plants as the crisis unfolded, he echoed Sullivan’s letter. “Think about how mad people were when they couldn’t get paper products. Think about if they couldn’t get food,” he told reporters https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/nebraska/articles/2020-04-23/nebraska-health-officials-4-new-covid-19-deaths-in-state. “It’s vitally important that we keep our food processors open and do everything we can to ensure the supply chain, because we would have civil unrest if that was not the case.”

This prospect appears to have been a hollow threat all along. The New York Times reported in mid-June https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/business/meat-industry-china-pork.html?smid=tw-share that even as Smithfield, which was purchased by a Chinese company in 2013 with backing from the Chinese government, was raising the specter of lockdown-induced food shortages to justify keeping its facilities open, the company was actually exporting 9,000 tons of pork to China in April—one of the meat-packer’s highest shipments to that market in years. Tyson saw its largest one-month export of pork to China in more than three years—and received several exemptions from the USDA to run its processing lines even faster. JBS posted a 332 percent https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/business/meat-industry-china-pork.html?smid=tw-share increase in profits in the spring quarter. All that cash stabilized uncertain stock prices for those meat companies.

–Ted Genoways, “Beyond Big Meat https://newrepublic.com/article/158679/beyond-big-meat-coronavirus-pandemic-meatpacking-monopoly ”