While Americans celebrated Independence Day last weekend, the meat industry was partaking of another time-tested tradition: concentration. That’s the economists’ term for when one big company buys another, resulting in an industry dominated by just a handful of players. And that’s what happened when Brazilian meat giant JBS plunked down $1.45 billion to buy the US pork interests of global agribusiness behemoth Cargill.

Sure, the US pork market was already pretty top-heavy before that deal, which won’t be consummated until US antitrust authorities approve it. As things stand now, even before the proposed merger, the big four pork packers (including JBS, through its Swift subsidiary) control a hefty 64 percent of the US pork market.

If the deal goes through, the combined JBS/Cargill operation will push out Tyson for the number two slot, Hormel will slide into fourth place, and the new Big Four will slaughter 71.5 percent of the hogs raised in the US. That’s a significant concentration of an already-concentrated market.

Phil Howard, a Michigan State University researcher who studies corporate control of the food system, says the deal is “bad news,” because “JBS will have even more power to drive down the prices it pays to farmers, and drive up the prices it charges to consumers.” He notes that just two companies, Smithfield and JBS, would together own 45.5 percent of the pork market, “moving closer to the Coke/Pepsi model of domination by just two giant firms.”

He also notes that Smithfield and JBS are both foreign-owned—JBS, the globe’s largest meat company, is based in Brazil, while Smithfield has been owned by the Chinese meat conglomerate Shuanghui since 2013. So why are outside firms muscling into the US pork market? After all, US demand for “the other white meat” isn’t exactly cooking. The opposite, in fact.