Meatpackers say they didn't collude to increase prices; oppose bill to make them buy part of supply in cash market

The chief executives of the nation's largest meat processors — JBS USA, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef — which control 85% of the nation's beef sales, "said on Wednesday that they were not the cause of surging meat prices at the grocery store, which are up by 15% in a year. And they told a skeptical House Agriculture chairman David Scott there was no pact to drive up profits at the expense of consumers or limit the meat supply for Americans," Chuck Abbott reports for the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Scott said he has studied anti-trust cases and noted that packer margins—the difference between the price packers pay farmers and the price wholesalers pay for the meat after it leaves the plant—abruptly went up in 2015 and have stayed that way, a feat that "can't possibly happen in a competitive market."

The executives said meat prices have gone up because of "surprisingly strong consumer demand, disruptions in production due to outbreaks of Covid-19 at packing plants, rising feed costs, and warfare in Ukraine," Abbott reports. Two senior Republicans on the committee accused the Biden administration of trying to blame the meat industry for inflation.

National Beef CEO Tim Klein also denounced the bipartisan reform bill that would require meatpackers to buy some of their cattle on the cash market in order to increase price transparency in regional cash markets, Abbott reports. More cash trade wouldn't help cattle farmers, Klein said.

"Earlier in the day, Missouri cattle farmer Coy Young told the committee his family's farm cannot continue operating long term unless changes are made to the cattle markets to allow cattle producers to earn profits," Todd Neeley reports for DTN/The Progressive Farmer. "Young was featured in a December 2021 New York Times story on the cattle industry. The Times reported Young had considered suicide." Five cattle farmers who were supposed to testify on Tuesday and Wednesday backed out, saying they feared retribution, Neeley reports.