If JBS Gobbles Up Smithfield, Three Companies Will Own the U.S. Meat Market

A typical supermarket's meat counter displays a landscape of easy bounty: shrink-wrapped chops, cutlets, steaks, roasts, loins, burger meat, and more, almost all of it priced to move.

June 29, 2010 | Source: Grist | by Tom Philpott

A typical supermarket’s meat counter displays a landscape of easy bounty: shrink-wrapped chops, cutlets, steaks, roasts, loins, burger meat, and more, almost all of it priced to move.

But the dizzying variety cloaks a disturbing uniformity. As the chart below shows, the great bulk of the meat consumed in the United States comes from just four large, powerful companies. These companies wield tremendous power to dictate not just what meat is available, but how that meat is raised.

For these “meat titans,” turning a profit selling cheap meat means slashing the cost of doing business. And that in turn means paying their farmer-suppliers as little as possible for live animals, and paying workers as little as possible to slaughter and process them.

Since the meat market began its dramatic arc of consolidation three decades ago, farmers have had to choose between scaling up, to make up on volume what they were losing on price, or exit the business altogether. As a result, millions of small, diversified farms have closed down their animal-raising operations over the past 30 years, and surviving farms have mostly scaled up, specialized in one species, and placed that species by the thousands in vast confinements known as concentrated animal feedlot operations, or CAFOs. These fragrant, teeming spaces are notorious sources of pollution and social decay in rural areas.