The Biden administration has beef with Big Meat.
The White House has criticized the four largest companies in the meat industry this week, accusing them of “raising prices while generating record profits during the pandemic” and blaming them for rising price inflation in stores. groceries from all over the country.
Rising beef, pork and poultry prices are driving the global rise in food prices seen since late 2020, said Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council.
As consumer prices have risen, farmers and ranchers have not seen the amount paid by giant meat companies increase, Deese also said.
“There is a concern about the lucrative pandemic, about companies that are pushing up price increases in a way that harms consumers who go to the grocery store,” Deese said in a briefing Wednesday.
The Biden administration went so far as to call “intermediaries” the four major meat companies that use their “power to squeeze both consumers and farmers and ranchers,” Deese and two White House aides wrote in a post. on the blog.
These four companies are Minnesota Commodity Trader Cargill, Arkansas-based chicken producer Tyson Foods, JBS, a meat packer in Brazil, and Missouri-based National Beef Packing Co. from Brazilian beef producer Marfrig Global Foods.
Together, these companies slaughtered about 85 percent of grain-fattened beef cattle that becomes fillets, roast beef and other cuts of meat in 2018, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Tyson Foods, which sells beef, pork and chicken, fired at the White House and called its allegations “inaccurate.”
In a statement, Tyson said the meat industry has suffered multiple market shocks due to “a global pandemic and severe weather conditions” that have unbalanced supply and demand across the industry and raised prices.
There has been a “drastic drop in meat processors’ capabilities to run at full capacity, ”Tyson said in a statement. “This led to an oversupply of live livestock and an insufficiency of beef, while demand for meat products reached an all-time high.”
The company also blamed labor shortages across the country for curbing its ability to increase meat supply to grocery stores. As for the chicken, Tyson has previously blamed the underperforming roosters for slowing down this year’s supply of new chicks.
Cargill, JBS and National Beef did not return The Post’s requests for comment.
“Issuing inflammatory statements that ignore the fundamentals of how supply and demand affects markets achieves nothing,” said Mark Dopp, director general of the American Meat Institute, an industry group that represents the meat packers.
In July, beef and veal prices rose by 6.5% over the previous year, while poultry prices rose by 5.3% and pork prices by 7.8%. higher, according to the latest data from the consumer price index.
According to federal data, chicken prices have risen further in the last year from any twelve-month period until 2004.
The USDA and the Department of Justice are already investigating pricing in the chicken processing industry, the White House said.
The administration added that the USDA will invest $ 1.4 billion in pandemic assistance to provide relief to small producers, processors, distributors, agricultural markets, seafood processors, and food and farm workers affected by COVID- 19.
The Big Meat hammer comes months after President Joe Biden made cracking down on anti-competitive business behavior and consolidating the industry a key part of his platform.
The meeting of a new White House Competition Council created by Biden is scheduled for Friday.
With publishing cables