The Behemoths Lurking in the Grocery Aisles
Episode 31 of Unconfined, in which antitrust lawyer Basel Musharbash makes the case that the companies that dominate our food and agriculture system have gotten too big and powerful.
Are Enormous Corporations Taking Our Lunch Money?
By Tom Philpott Subscribe to Host Notes
As summer approaches, many readers of this piece will likely go shopping at a farmers market sometime soon. There, they can expect to encounter a cornucopia of pesticide-free fruits and vegetables and pasture-raised meat, dairy, and eggs. Altogether, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest data show, U.S. consumers spend about $2.4 billion annually on food bought directly from nearby farms. That number reflects impressive growth of local food economies over the past 30 years.
Yet our teeming, bountiful farmers markets sum up to not much more than a rounding error within the broader $1.06 trillion U.S. market for food consumed at home. On the latest episode of Unconfined, we feature antitrust attorney Basel Musharbash, who shows that the great majority of those expenditures flow into the coffers of a set of enormous transnational firms, which wield huge control over what most U.S. residents eat, how much they pay for food, and how much farmers earn. Their coffers swell from the sale of everything from chicken to beer, from wine to bagged salad greens, says Musharbash, the managing attorney of the Paris, Texas-based legal outfit Antimonopoly Counsel.
Consider that just four corporations—Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and Marfig—slaughter and process 85 percent of U.S.-raised cattle. That gives them tremendous power over the beef market. Two of those companies, JBS and Marfig, are based in Brazil and hold dominant positions in that nation's vast beef market. This means they can easily import beef from their home country to undercut U.S. ranchers when it suits them. Currently, U.S. beef prices stand at all-time highs even as ranchers struggle to stay afloat. In other words, their market weight squeezes consumers and farmers alike.
One way to measure the level of corporate consolidation is to look at the amount of market share owned by the top four firms in a given market—a metric known as CR4. In antitrust theory, when CR4 surpasses 40 percent—that is, when four firms control more than 40 percent of a market—these giant players wield unfair power to dictate terms to their suppliers (in this case, farmers).
In his excellent recent paper, “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life," written for the sustainable agriculture advocacy group Family Farm Action, Musharbash shows that while beef is an extreme example of concentration within the food and agriculture space, it's hardly alone. Farmers, too, confront similarly oversized and powerful suppliers of seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers. This chart, taken from the paper, highlights just a fraction of the food and agribusiness categories that exist in a state of corporate hyper-consolidation. You can find many more examples in Musharbash's paper as well as in a 2020 one by a research team led by the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson.
In our conversation, Musharbash lays out the story of how corporate giants came to gobble up our food system, accelerated by a change in antitrust policy in the age of Reagan. Then we talked through how these levels of concentration harm farmers, workers, and consumers—and how these groups are organizing to push back. Ultimately, he makes clear that if we want to see the local and regional food networks on display at the farmers market break out of their niche status, Big Food’s power must be confronted. Tune in!
In Host Notes, the voices behind Unconfined podcast deliver additional context to supplement our interviews. Their views do not necessarily reflect those of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future or the Johns Hopkins University.