Cracking Down on Egg Industry’s Excuses: It’s Price Gouging
Egg companies’ profits are skyrocketing as they blame avian flu and inflation for their price hikes. Let’s call this what it is: price gouging.
Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub
Our food system is in crisis. Unprecedented consolidation across the food and agriculture system is harming every American as a handful of corporations amass more power and profits off the backs of everyone else.
Whether you’re a farmer getting squeezed, a consumer getting price gouged, or a policymaker looking for solutions, you’re in the right place. Explore Farm Action’s agriculture consolidation data hub to learn more about the state of concentration in our food system, why it matters, and how to reform it.
DIVE INTO THE DATA
How does food get from the farm to our tables? After decades of consolidation, the answer might surprise you. Today, a handful of powerful corporations are deciding who farms, what they farm, and who gets to eat. Our primer explains how we got here. Click below to learn more.
Decades of mergers have concentrated power into the hands of just a few dominant corporations, crushing competition across food and agriculture markets.
Economists find that market abuses — such as price fixing, price gouging, and wage fixing — are likely to occur when the concentration ratio of the top four firms (CR4) exceeds 40%. Concentration levels surpass that percentage in almost every food and agriculture sector, from seeds, to agricultural equipment, to meat processing. Click below to see the sector-by-sector data.
Learn more about the history and impact of consolidation in each industry with our easy to follow fact sheets.
Our report provides definitive evidence of corporate control over who gets to farm, how they farm, what food gets produced and sold in this country, and how much consumers must pay for it.
This landmark investigation details the policy choices and corporate actions that got us here by diving into the history of antimonopoly policy in American agriculture and conducting in-depth investigations into each major sector of today’s agricultural economy.
Around three dozen corporations now dictate the lines of development and terms of trade for almost every industry involved in the growing, processing, and distribution of food in America. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement have culminated in these unprecedented levels of concentration. Meanwhile, corporations rake in record profits, farmers and workers get squeezed, and consumers pay the price at the grocery store. As the report shows, however, America has been here before, and it was government regulation of monopolies that freed farmers, workers, and consumers from corporate control. Today, we have reached a critical point where such enforcement and regulation are once again necessary.
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter praises our report during our report briefing webinar. Click here to watch the briefing.
Our research is made possible by supporters like you.
Help fund our fight to create a food system that works for everyone, not just a handful of powerful corporations.
IMPACTS OF CONSOLIDATION
Farm Action has been a leader in exposing corporate price gouging across the food and farm system. Below are just three examples of price gouging, and what we’re doing about it.
Egg companies’ profits are skyrocketing as they blame avian flu and inflation for their price hikes. Let’s call this what it is: price gouging.
Months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fertilizer prices spiked to all-time highs. When we looked into it, we found that fertilizer corporations’ own financial statements disproved their excuses about higher costs and supply chain issues.
Three years after Tyson’s Holcomb KS plant fire, Big Meat is still using it as an example of a supply chain disruption — but this excuse just provides cover while they reap excessive profits.
Ten people from across the food supply chain share their first-person accounts of what it’s like to live, work, and try to earn a fair wage in our consolidated food and agriculture system.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
As farmers are driven off their land, it opens the door for investors — domestic and foreign alike — to snap up farmland. Millions of acres of farmland are now in the hands of investors, driving up prices up for everyone else and creating an entry barrier for new farmers. These investors then extract natural resources from rural communities and transfer that wealth to their shareholders. Learn more about the harms of foreign, corporate, and billionaire farmland ownership below.
The speed, size, and secrecy of “Farmer Bill’s” land purchases set off alarm bells. Why does a tech-obsessed billionaire need 240,000 acres of farmland?
As of late 2019, foreign investors have held an interest in almost 35.2 million acres of U.S. farmland. That’s an area larger than the state of New York. In the past 17 years alone, foreign farmland holdings have doubled in the U.S. and the trend is showing no signs of slowing.
In this must-read piece, we reveal how Big Ag corporations pocket billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies.
Farm Action is standing guard as corporations plan mergers and acquisitions to tighten their grip on our food system by calling attention to the impacts of their plans, providing input to federal regulators, and rallying public opposition.
“Today’s ruling is a win for farmers, workers, and consumers alike,” Farm Action President Angela Huffman said.
America’s antitrust enforcers must prevent dominant firms from capitalizing on investments made with public resources, we told DOJ and FTC in a letter.
The U.S. has laws in place to protect producers and food system workers from abusive corporate power. You can file a complaint or tip if you suspect a violation of the Packers and Stockyards Act or any other federal law governing fair and competitive marketing and contract growing of livestock and poultry.