Grocery stores are struggling to stock their shelves, but food suppliers are destroying their inventory (including livestock, in horrific and gruesome ways). What's going on?
Monopolies.
washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/28/why…
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Monopolies.
washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/28/why…
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It turns out that 40 years of allowing companies to grow through traditionally prohibited monopoly tactics - like creating vertical monopolies, merging with major competitors, and buying up and strangling small future competitors makes everything VERY brittle.
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50 factories process 98% of America's beef. 88% of America's hog slaughtering is done in facilities that hold 1,000,000+ pigs at a time. With all our eggs (and chickens) in just a few baskets, a single hiccup shatters whole supply chains.
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What's more, big facilities are breeding grounds for both human and animal pathogens. Both livestock and humans are crowded into these factories, so any disease roars through them like a wildfire.
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Not just meat, either. Dairy and vegetable farmers are forced by big food companies like Heinz to use a single seed to grow a single product that has a single use - and can't be readily substituted with or for when things go bad.
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Specialization in distribution channels means that egg farmers can only get product to market if certain specific facilities can process them - which is why contract farmers are slaughtering thousands of healthy egg-laying chickens due to Cargill plant closures.
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In case there was any doubt that this is a disease of scale, just look at the way that small farmers have adapted: "they’re changing on a dime to online ordering systems and delivery." Small firms are nimble.
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The same neoliberal "efficiency" drives that sucked all the slack and resilience out of food production also laid waste to the USDA's Depression-era public wholesale markets and food terminals, which used to cushion this kind of disruption.
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Left to their own, all markets turn into financial markets, and all financial markets turn into ways to starve the real economy in order to enrich the wealthy, who find it cheaper to lobby for weaker rules than to comply with the rules we've put in place to protect ourselves.
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The pandemic is a high-pressure instrument that has revealed the deep fault lines we've long argued were there all along. The system has shattered. The time for papering over its cracks is gone forever.
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