In the August 17, 2020 article Midwest Ranchers Renew Price-Fixing Claims During Coronavirus Shutdowns, Kansas City-based KCUR 89.3 radio contributor Frank Morris covered concerns involving price-fixing in beef packing and the implications of COVID-90. From the article:
“It’s a system that has been decades in the making. U.S. beef packing telescoped from hundreds of independent slaughterhouses down to primarily four big corporations by the 1990s. Those four — JBS, Tyson, National Beef and Cargill — operate huge plants that concentrate the production.
“We have a lot of eaters at the bottom of the supply chain. We have a lot of producers at the top of the supply chain, but the middle part is bottlenecked because we don’t have a lot of competition there,” says Diana Moss, President of the American Antitrust Institute.”
