“Today, 63 farmers will go out of business.”
“Farmers are going broke.”
“At the same time as … families can’t feed their kids.”
“Yet across agriculture and food sectors, dominant corporations are posting record profits.”
Farm Action’s Joe Maxwell delivered an urgent call to break up corporate monopolies in our food system at a roundtable hosted by
@SenSchumer.
The problem is much, much worse than you think.
“When I began farming in 1980, the top four beef packers controlled about 36% of the cattle.”
“Today, it’s 85% of the fat cattle.”
“There were 56 fertilizer companies.”
“Today, there’s three dominant ones.”
“They use supply chain disruptions to gouge the consumer and take advantage of the farmer.”
“And these farmers will be coming here and asking for another bailout from Congress, fourth time in just a little over a year.”
“Companies themselves acknowledged at the time and filings with the SEC that a large share of their pricing is not tied to their cost, but how much a farmer gets paid.”
“The more bailout money you give the farmers, the more the input companies are gonna charge.”
“That’s how monopoly power works.”
“We also need to confront the role of commodity checkoff programs.”
“These programs were created to support farmers.”
“But today, a large share of mandatory farmer funds flows into marketing and policy influencing the Congress.”
“They primarily benefit the processors and dominant firms.”
“For more than four decades, both parties have actually allowed the sliding towards monopoly control.”