Civil Eats

While the big news among good food activists has been the unsettling possibility that a secret farm bill could be snuck into the super committee’s recommendations and passed with no public input, Republicans have furtively dealt a crippling blow to family farmers and consumers. This week, House Republicans included language in a budget bill that gutted the fair livestock rules that have languished for more than 80 years. Once again, Big Meat has derailed the commonsense protections that allow small livestock producers to compete and check the abusive practices of the poultry industry. Read More

Like any good finale episode, last week’s final USDA/Department of Justice (DOJ) listening session on consolidation in food and agriculture featured recurring themes and a montage of familiar characters from throughout the season, plus a few new twists. Attorney General Eric Holder, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney opened the workshop with statements about competition and fairness. Echoing previous sessions, they and the other moderators were joined on panels throughout the day by meat, dairy, and produce industry representatives, economists and antitrust law experts, vegetable and dairy farmers, and poultry growers and ranchers. New to the panels this time were food marketers, grocers’ associations, and consumer groups. Read More

Over the last year, in towns around the country, thousands of farmers, ranchers, and concerned citizens have packed auditoriums to overflow capacity–not for a rock concert or even a farm auction, but for the leaders of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the USDA. The departments have been on a listening tour, taking them from Iowa to Alabama and Wisconsin to Colorado, to hear from food producers about how corporate consolidation in food and agriculture markets has affected their livelihoods. Next stop? Washington, DC, this Wednesday, December 8. Read More

Appropriately, the evening began with a picnic featuring local cheese and ended with an ice cream social under a yellow moon. In between, dairy farmers, consumer advocates, professors, labor union representatives, faith communities, antihunger advocates, an aspiring cheesemaker, and even a Certified Public Accountant spoke out forcefully about the widespread injustices in the dairy industry.

The main event was a Dairy Town Hall Forum in Madison, Wisconsin, sponsored by Family Farm Defenders, National Family Farm Coalition, and Food and Water Watch, and timed to coincide with Friday’s Department of Justice and USDA workshop examining corporate concentration in the dairy industry. The workshop today is part of the ongoing investigation (which I reported on here) by the two departments to determine whether food and agriculture companies have become too concentrated. Read More

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the panel for the second public workshop on regulation and competition issues in agriculture, which will take place this Friday, May 21 in Normal, Alabama. The workshop will focus on production contracts, concentration and buyer power in the poultry industry, in which four of the top producers — Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms — controlled 58.5% of the poultry market as of January 2007. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division Christine Varney will be at Friday’s workshop, which is important because it gives producers, consumers and advocates a chance to speak on record about how the practices of these companies affect them. Read More

The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops began last Friday in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels–and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.

It’s hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government’s claim that they’re shocked, shocked to discover there’s anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been–in Washington at least–the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it’s the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing. Read More

What would you say if I told you that one company is making decisions about what you eat? As it turns out, a new report [pdf] released last week by the Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering reveals that Monsanto controls the genetic traits — and thus the seeds — of most of the corn, soy and cotton grown in the US; and that they are using their control of the market to raise prices on their products and limit access to non-genetically modified (GM) seed.

This means that farmers are unable to make decisions about what they grow, and also that they grow more to make ends meet, pushing more corn and soy on the market to be processed into a proliferation of packaged foods — making up most of what is available to eat. This report details the history of seed consolidation (including excellent visuals mapping larger chemical companies’ acquisitions of smaller seed companies), provides recommendations, and importantly, gives a voice to some of the affected farmers from all over the United States. Read More