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Nobody was physically injured when an August 2019 fire broke out at a Tyson Foods’-owned beef packing plant in Holcomb, Kansas, but plenty of wallets were.
The resulting four-month shutdown of the country’s second-largest beef packing plant, which was responsible for roughly 6% of the country’s total beef slaughter at the time, triggered wholesale beef prices to rise 10%, harming restaurant chains, grocery stores, and individual consumers shopping in the meat aisle.
That one fire at a single meat packing plant could have such a dramatic effect on beef prices was the result of years worth of consolidation in the meat industry. Each year since 1980, an average of almost 17,000 cattle ranchers have gone out of business, according to a 2019 report from the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think-tank. In the mid-1990s, nearly 90% of U.S. hogs were sold into competitive markets, but by 2019 the proportion was under 7%, the report says. Four mega meat packers control 85% of the beef market, four firms control 54% of the poultry market, and four firms control 70% of the hog processing market.
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The Holcomb fire brought the meat market consolidation closer to the forefront of consumer awareness as prices rose, but the problem has been revealed repeatedly over the past three years. When there are so few meat processors, one-off emergencies—like ransomware attacks or pandemic outbreaks—at even a few meat processing factories can vastly reduce the amount of animals that can be turned into consumable meat across the nation. In the early days of the pandemic, for example, the number of pigs that could be processed declined by 45% as COVID-19 spread through the factories’ assembly lines. Pork breeders had to “liquidate” perfectly healthy pigs that they could no longer afford to feed and had no alternative meat processors on which to unload them. Customers couldn’t find their usual selections of protein in grocery stores, or began paying…
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Source : time
