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Aug. 27, 2022 - Epoch Times

15:55

‘Globalist Monopoly’ Owns 85% of US Cattle Supply Chain, Destroying American Ranchers

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	These right here are American cowboys, one of the most iconic symbols of the American West.
	However, these ranchers, as well as cattlemen across the entire nation, well, they're facing what can only be described as an existential challenge from globalist entities that seek to consolidate as well as to control the production of food.
	And in that consolidation process, they're making it quite literally impossible for American ranchers to survive.
	Now, to be more specific, the production of beef has, over the last several years now, and unbeknownst to most people, come to be controlled by a monopoly of only four companies, three of which are controlled by foreign entities, including one that is based out of China.
	And so, in order to break down how this came to be, As well as how the situation is not only destroying our domestic beef industry, but also can lead to actual food shortages, well, I sat down with Dr.
	Brooke Miller, who is the president of the U.S. Cattlemen's Association, which is the organization that represents the interests of American cattle ranchers against the interests of globalists.
	And he explained to me how these giant conglomerates came to monopolize the industry and drive out American cattle ranchers by the thousands.
	Cattle ranchers are going out of business and going broke all the time.
	And we've been losing thousands and thousands of cattle ranchers over the last several decades.
	And it's all based on the fact that we have four multinational corporations that dominate the food protein industry.
	They have anti-competitive practices and they basically steal a lot of money out of rural America when Live cattle prices are high.
	Rural America reinvests, and it's very profitable.
	But for so many years, it's been unprofitable.
	We'll have a couple years that are profitable.
	The cattle ranchers are some of the best businessmen in the world as far as being able to manage.
	They may not be the best businessmen by being in that avocation, but They're some of the smartest people that I know, and they can somehow squeeze out a living when a lot of people couldn't.
	So when you say four companies control this industry, can you break that down a little bit further?
	Let's say I want to start my own ranch.
	So I buy up land, I buy a couple of animals, I begin the process of raising them, feeding them, etc.
	At what point do I have to interact with one of these four companies?
	Well, you may never have to interact with one of these four companies, but you'll feel the effects of these four companies.
	Most cattle producers across this country have a cow herd, and they raise calves as their commodity.
	And they sell those calves.
	They can sell those calves anywhere from seven to eight months, or they can own them all the way through the feedlot.
	When they go from the cattle ranchers ranch, they're sold to different buyers who then grow those cattle and try to put on economic gains with low-cost foods.
	And then eventually they'll go into a feedlot where they'll be fattened and slaughtered.
	And those are the cattle where the market breaks down is at the feedlot, between the feedlot and the packer.
	The packer then purchases those cattle from feedlots, slaughters them, and then sells them to wholesalers and retailers.
	And they have such a monopoly, there is really no free market in the live fat cattle marketplace.
	So when you say the four companies have a monopoly, is it a monopoly on the slaughtering, the feedlots, which part of the equation?
	When they're purchasing cattle from people that fatten the cattle on the feedlots, they have a monopoly and they basically, there's no price discovery, true price discovery.
	They basically set the price and tell them this is what you're going to get.
	So prior to the interview, we were chatting a little bit, and you said out of these four companies, only one of them is an American company, right?
	So can you sort of break that down for the audience?
	Can you break down what these four companies are, who owns them ultimately, and how did it come to be that these four companies, 75% of which are not American companies, came to preside over the entire industry here in the U.S.? Well, there are four companies that control the protein in the world.
	You have the American company Cargill.
	You have Tyson Foods, which is a multinational, I think highly invested by the Chinese.
	And then you have two Brazilian companies, Manfred and JBS. And JBS is the largest meatpacking company in the world.
	And they are run actually by the Batista family and the two...
	Heads of that company spent time in jail in Brazil because of bribery charges.
	And they basically...
	Through mergers and acquisitions have become the largest, and our government has allowed those mergers and acquisitions to occur because they thought bigger was better and more efficient.
	And I think the COVID-19 crisis and the food chain or the supply chain issues we had with that show that it's not the most efficient way to do it.
	We need a more regional, diverse food system.
	There was a similar sort of setup with the baby formula market, right?
	Where there was like one, there's just a handful of plants.
	One plant was shut down by the FDA temporarily, but apparently they didn't have the foresight to see, hey, if we shut down this plant, which provided some outrageously large percentage of the baby formula in the country, there's going to be a baby formula shortage.
	So like what you said with COVID, Did it reveal any of these type of problems where if, let's say, one of these companies or just a few small plants were to shut down, how would it affect the beef market here in America?
	Well, we saw that with COVID-19 when the pandemic initially happened.
	We saw shortages of meat in the meat counter.
	We saw prices go really high.
	And we saw a dramatic drop in what farmers and ranchers or feedlots were getting for their...
	Getting for their fat cattle, and that just trickled on down to the producers.
	Everybody saw depression, depression of their prices.
	What happened was we had a couple plants where there was COVID outbreaks, and they shut those plants down.
	And it completely disrupted the supply chain.
	And the monopoly, however, thrived because their profits went through the roof.
	They could pretty much charge what they wanted to the retailers and the wholesalers, and they could pretty much pay what they wanted to fat cattle market and the live cattle market.
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	Let me ask you this.
	A lot of the people...
	Across America, I'm sure many people who watch this program go to their supermarket store shelves week after week, and they notice that the price of meat is just going up and up and up and up.
	Every week, pretty much.
	Is that due to inflation?
	Inflationary forces like the price of fuel, money losing its value, and the price of every step of that process going up?
	Or is it the fact that this monopoly has price control and therefore they see this inflationary environment and they say, hey, we can pad our profit margins by increasing the price because consumers have to accept a higher price right now because it's an inflationary market.
	What do you see happening?
	I would say both, but largely the monopoly.
	You know, I mean, our fuel prices have doubled, our input prices have doubled, but that doesn't mean we're going to get more for our meat.
	Now, right now, there's such a shortage.
	The, quote, cow herd that produces the cattle...
	It's lower than it's been in 30, 40 years.
	But that's because the monopolies have forced a lot of cattle ranchers out of the market.
	And they've done this in many ways, but they import beef from foreign countries and label it as U.S. beef.
	Can you believe that?
	How are they able to do that?
	Because our government allows them.
	As long as they're slaughtered here in the U.S.? Doesn't even matter.
	I'll give you a little history lesson.
	Back in the early...
	2010, 2011, we had a bill that, maybe it was 2009, a bill that passed in the Farm Bill called Country of Origin Labeling.
	And that was a law that said any beef that's sold in the United States must be clearly labeled as to where it was born, raised, and processed.
	The Canadian government and the Mexican government sued the United States and the World Trade Organization, saying that that was against the North American Free Trade Agreement.
	And it was presided over by a Mexican judge.
	Eventually that went back and forth for many, many years.
	Eventually after it was appealed and everything, it was decided that it was illegal for the United States to require food to be labeled as to where it was originated.
	So they repealed it.
	Congress folded and the Obama administration folded and just under pressure because they were going to award retaliatory tariffs to Canada and Mexico.
	And so they repealed country of origin labeling in June of 2015.
	Immediately within one week we saw a 40% drop in live cattle prices.
	And so what's happening now is it reverted to an old rule that said basically the meat at the meat counter Can be labeled product of the USA if it is significantly transformed within our borders.
	Significant transformation by what the USDA calls a significant transformation is simply repackaging or slicing the meat.
	It doesn't have to be born here.
	It doesn't have to be raised here.
	It doesn't have to be slaughtered here.
	It can just be repackaged and relabeled.
	I feel like that's a secret.
	You just revealed a secret to the audience that almost nobody knows about.
	Well, it's not a secret in the cattle industry, but it is a secret to a large part of America.
	And believe me, I've been screaming from the loudest rooftop trying to get people to recognize this fact.
	And, you know, it's hurting America.
	It really is, because if we run all of our cattle ranchers out of We're going to see huge rises in our food prices, and we're going to be dependent upon these four multinational corporations for our food and foreign countries for our food.
	You're paying a higher price of the supermarket for a steak.
	You at least assume that, okay, an American company is taking that money, making a bit of profit, then it's going to the ranchers, making a bit of profit.
	But that might not be the case.
	It might be a Brazilian company taking those profits back to Brazil, and it might be a Mexican cattle rancher taking those profits, essentially cutting America out of the picture altogether.
	Yeah, and it's really harm in rural America because rural America is so dependent upon agriculture, and when agricultural prices are depressed, all of rural America suffers.
	And when rural America suffers, I mean, we have an opioid crisis in rural America.
	It's tough.
	That's shocking.
	I'm fortunate because I'm a physician.
	But I couldn't raise a family on what I make as a cattle rancher.
	Not even close.
	In the past, would you have been able to?
	Not any time in the recent past.
	Not any time in the recent past.
	Well, so you're the president of the U.S. Cattlemen's Association.
	Is there any hope?
	Is there any possible solution and actually potentially implementable solution that you could recommend?
	Let's say if you're in charge of some industry in the government, the AG industry or the AG department, could you actually do anything about this?
	Well, I think the Department of Justice needs to do a really good job in investigating these Packers because they're obviously practicing anti-competitive practices.
	And I personally feel like they need to do what they did to Standard Oil in 1921, and that's break them up.
	As long as we have four major corporations that control our protein market and our food market, they will always find a way around the law.
	Right now we have a very important piece of legislation that's not an end-all be-all but it is something that will help.
	It's called the Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act of 2022.
	It's a bipartisan bill.
	Deb Fisher from Nebraska and Charles Grassley from Iowa are the main people that started it.
	And there were other people.
	John Tester from Montana.
	There are a lot of people that are on it.
	it, but it's receiving tremendous pushback from big business and all their lobby.
	And it's passed the Senate Ag Committee, I think, but we need to get it to the Senate Ag floor, and we also need to get it to the U.S. House of Representatives floor and pass this very important legislation.
	It's not an end-all, be-all, but it will help stop the bleeding for a little while right What's happening is there's been a reduction in competitive cash market over the last several decades, and it's gotten to critical points.
	And what we're trying to do is set a mandatory minimum that each one of these packers must participate in a live cash market at a certain percentage each week for each plant.
	So you sort of laid out a proposal of what Senator Grassley put into potential legislation in the Senate.
	If that is not, let's say, passed, or if it's not passed soon, what do you foresee happening in this industry here in America?
	I see a complete total integration in our food chain, and it's going to be completely dominated even more so by the four major corporations.
	I see more and more ranchers going out of business.
	I see a food shortage and a food crisis.
	I will like to add one...
	Now, that was not the full interview.
	If you'd like to watch this interview in its glorious entirety, you can do so over on Epic TV, our awesome no-censorship video platform.
	The link will be right there at the very top of the description box.
	And I'd like to mention that besides the entirety of this interview, well, over on Epic TV... Every single week, I publish somewhere between two to three exclusive episodes of Facts Matter that, quite frankly, due to the regime of censorship here on YouTube, we cannot publish on this platform.
	And so, if you'd like to head on over to Epic TV, check out the entirety of this interview, as well as all that other great exclusive content.
	Well, again, the link will be right there at the very top of the description box.
	I hope you check it out.
	And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.

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