The new U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, aims to curb the market dominance of the major meat and food corporations in the United States. The new USDA official wants to expose cartel formation and price-fixing agreements sooner and have them prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Recently, illegal price-fixing among some of the largest meat processors in the U.S. poultry sector has come to light. Top executives and companies have been fined millions of dollars.
Minister Vilsack is now reviving a working group from his previous term, Dow Jones News reports. The USDA will work more closely with the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, develop new guidelines for agriculture, and may review patent protections for agricultural products.
The USDA already addressed these issues during the Obama administration but faced criticism from the agricultural sector for achieving too little at the time. Vilsack and the new U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, have called on consumer groups and labor unions to reform the American dairy industry following the Canadian model, where prices and milk supply are regulated and monitored by the government.
However, it is unlikely that the large American dairy industry will want anything to do with government interference in the free market mechanism. Moreover, President Joe Biden has promised American farmers that he does not intend to impose anything from the top down but wants to stimulate livestock and agriculture toward greener production through subsidies.
Biden and Vilsack expect that especially the capture and storage of carbon could become a new standard part of federal agricultural policy. President Biden has described climate change as an existential threat.
He says that American agriculture should be the first in the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. By paying farmers to capture and store carbon in the soil, a new revenue model is created.