Since well before the current lockdowns, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has been raising an alarm about the monopolistic and over-regulated meat processing industry, which leaves our food supply vulnerable to unexpected disruptions.
It took the COVID-19 crisis to get his colleagues in the House of Representatives to take the issue seriously, but a bill to address looming meat shortages with a local, free-market solution is finally making headway with bipartisan support.
Massie joined the show with an urgent message for all Americans, as the common-sense reform in his PRIME Act challenges special interests who want to keep a lockdown on smaller-scale meat processing.
Urge your representative to vote for the PRIME Act, and listen to my full conversation with Congressman Massie on his new bill:
“Remember when the AAA killed 1 million hogs a day? Instead of hogs it’s men today. Plow the fourth one under.” – The Almanac Singers
During the Great Depression, the Agricultural Adjustment Agency — one of the forerunners to the USDA — paid farmers to euthanize and “plow under” millions of livestock to prevent a price drop. This was ostensibly to support farmers and balance supply and demand, but historians of the Depression view this one of the greatest policy errors of the time.
Today, we see the same senseless, wholesale killing of millions of perfectly healthy chickens and pigs. Cattle are next in line. This time, the livestock are being prevented from reaching the market by a bottleneck in the heavily-regulated, crony-controlled meat processing industry.
Since 1967, the Federal government has required all meat raised for “public consumption” to go through a small number of central facilities, which must be overseen by a full-time USDA inspector.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a small-scale cattle farmer himself, has a plan to avert the looming shortage by simply allowing smaller state-regulated-and-inspected facilities — such as the ones he uses to process and sell his cows locally — to make up for the demand shortfall within each state. These Small-scale processors are still inspected regularly by the USDA, but are not large enough to warrant a full-time inspector. While the current regulation is justified in the name of consumer protection, in reality it smothers competition from smaller producers who can’t afford to comply with the high regulatory barriers — effectively creating an oligopoly.
The “cartelization” of Big Agricultural dates back to the Depression, when lobbyists and federal regulators formed an unholy alliance that gave rise to agencies like the AAA. Even local food production got swept up in the dragnet of New Deal-era laws under the guise of interstate commerce regulation. This continued with the 1967 passage of the Wholesome Meat Act, when there were still 10,000 slaughterhouses nationwide. Today there are less than 3,000 slaughterhouses — many of which are now closing due to COVID-19.
In this classic example of “regulatory capture,” the powerful meat lobby has authored inspection requirements to favor big firms, and limited small-scale processing plants to selling only to family and employees. Massie’s bill would expand these sales to the local community — exempting them from the federal requirements so long as sales remain within the state, hence the “intrastate meat exemption” in the fitting PRIME Act acronym.
Safety Concerns & Food Federalism
So far, the PRIME Act has gained support from both Democrats and Republicans. Small-scale production is often more environmentally friendly and safer for the consumer, since it depends on localized knowledge and trust within the community rather than bureaucracy and red tape.
Naturally, the powerful National Pork Producers Council opposes the bill, since it threatens to break up their monopoly once and for all.
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