WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday announced multiple steps to deliver on the president’s Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy to promote fair and competitive markets for American farmers and ranchers, and lower food prices for American families.
The following actions were announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a Farmers and Ranchers in Action event hosted by the White House:
- First, through a multipart framework, USDA is leveraging its funding and research capacity, as well as interagency partnerships, to increase transparency and improve researcher access to seed germplasm, the starting materials plant breeders need to create diverse, resilient, and competitive seed varieties. These were key recommendations identified in USDA’s 2023 report, “More and Better Choices for Farmers: Promoting Fair Competition and Innovation in Seeds and Other Agricultural Inputs.”
- Second, USDA published an interim report that assesses competitive conditions in the meat retail industry. The report draws on over 1,600 comments received from the public in response to USDA requests for information, interviews with small, medium, and large meatpackers, distributors, retailers, academics, and farmer or advocacy organizations. It identifies hidden fees and unjust/anticompetitive pricing strategies present in the beef market as a case study.
- Third, USDA announced the next steps in a new rulemaking effort under the Packers & Stockyards Act of 1921 to enhance price discovery and fairness in cattle markets. For years, USDA has fielded complaints from producers around beef packers using reported regional cash or spot prices as base prices for fed cattle formula pricing agreements, commonly known as Alternative Marketing Agreements (AMAs). USDA is issuing an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) to seek comment on several possible interventions to develop new benchmarks as AMA base prices and approaches to trading when using benchmarks.
As President Biden outlined in the Competition Executive Order, consolidation in the agricultural industry is making it too hard for small family farms to survive as they face concentrated market power in the channels for selling agricultural products. In part due to the Administration’s efforts to tackle predatory pricing throughout the American economy, grocery inflation has improved as has certain key agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, but meat prices remain too high and competition in seeds markets remains highly constrained.
