Editor’s Desk: A ‘simple’ fix for high food prices, and an app gone awry

By Theodore Ross

It’s always worth reminding the people who care about the work FERN does that we are an independent, nonpartisan source of news and information about food and the environment. But independent and nonpartisan does not mean apolitical. You may have noticed that we are in the final, tortured stages of an election cycle, and the writers and thinkers we work with are reckoning with the political issues of the day as they relate to our subjects. In many cases that means assessing the actions of politicians in the federal government as well as the use of federal enforcement mechanisms.

“Time to bust the meat trust,” the latest article by FERN senior editor Ted Genoways, co-published in the opinion pages of The Washington Post, is such an article. Its subject is the high cost of meat in this country, and the less-than-accurate belief that those prices — a pivotal issue of the presidential race — can be solely attributed to the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic:

In June 2020, as pandemic prices were reaching a peak, the Justice Department revealed that top executives at chicken processors Pilgrim’s Pride and Claxton Poultry Farms had been indicted on charges of conspiring to fix prices in violation of federal antitrust laws. (Tyson Foods had agreed to cooperate with the investigators in return for immunity from prosecution.) Next, the department issued civil subpoenas to “The Big Four” beef processors — JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef — seeking information about possible collusion in that market as well. JBS and Tyson were also asked to produce documents related to their pork-processing plants. With the Big Four under investigation, I wrote at the time, there seemed a real chance of reestablishing a “fair and transparent” marketplace with lower costs for consumers.

It didn’t happen.

The why of that failure is where those federal folks come into play, and Genoways has a strong suggestion for what can be done to fix that predicament. He also argues that the fix he believes is needed is highly unlikely to happen if Donald Trump is president:

If Kamala Harris hopes to bring down prices … it will not be enough to ask the Justice Department to enter into settlements for anticompetitive behavior or empower the FTC to impose new fines … We must use antitrust laws to break up the Big Four.

Simple, right?

We published another complex story this week, by FERN contributor Stephen Robert Miller,  in partnership with Wired, which I think of as a parable of temptation in the tech world. “This app set out to fight pesticides. Once VC stepped in, the app helped sell them,” tells the story of Progressive Environmental & Agricultural Technologies, or PEAT, a Silicon Valley darling and creator of an app called Plantix. In this story, Miller explains how Plantix travels the disappointing road from corporate idealism, hoping to “save the environment by using less pesticides,” to corporate realism, now owned by one of the largest pesticide-producing chemical companies in the world:

“Plantix began its journey as an idea in the heads of people who recognized the problems with industrialized agriculture and explored ambitious ways of solving them … [T]hey also wanted to build a successful business … which has led them to an app that makes it easy to do the easy thing, even if it’s not the best thing for people or the planet.”

Busy week here at FERN HQ. As always we are proud of making this kind of journalism, and grateful for the privilege of your support to keep doing so. And now, in the spirit of independence and nonpartisanship, please do not forget to vote. Or to donate to FERN!