February 2025
Farm Action sought to evaluate U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversight of checkoff programs by submitting a detailed request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Our investigation found that USDA has reneged on its responsibilities to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of farmer tax dollars.
September 2024
Our report reveals definitive evidence of excessive market concentration across all food and agriculture sectors, demonstrating the urgent need for the U.S. government to break up the dominant corporations and free our economy to work for the people producing, processing, and distributing our food.
July 2024
Farm Action released the most up-to-date and comprehensive concentration data across the food and agriculture sectors, revealing a dire situation across the food system.
September 2023
Documenting the decline in domestic production of produce, legumes, and whole grains, this report reveals that the U.S. is increasingly dependent on imports for these essential foods. The resulting agricultural trade deficit could be balanced by converting less than 0.5 percent of current farm acreage to the production of these essential crops. Alongside this research, our political affiliate Farm Action Fund released policy recommendations to support this shift in production.
July 2023
With 17 months left in President Biden’s current term to deliver on his executive order promoting competition in the economy, Farm Action and Open Markets Institute unveiled a new report card grading the Administration’s progress on the executive order directives.
June 2022
Together with Open Markets Institute, Farm Action graded the Biden administration’s progress towards a July 2021 executive order that directed multiple federal agencies to revive antitrust enforcement and promote competition throughout the U.S. economy.
March 2022
In the spring of 2022, Farm Action’s Angela Huffman spoke at the world’s largest antitrust conference, hosted by the American Bar Association, on a panel titled “Is Competition in Agriculture Suffering a Drought?” For this event, the Farm Action team produced a research report demonstrating the importance of the Packers and Stockyards Act (P&S Act) and antitrust law for American farmers raising livestock and poultry.
January 2022
Prepared to supplement Farm Action’s testimony to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, this report uses the highly-consolidated fertilizer industry to illustrate how corporate consolidation extracts wealth from farmers, workers, and rural communities. Concentration at this level is more than a series of abstract figures, but rather a precarious condition that has real-world consequences for people across the country.
July 2021
The corporate industrial stranglehold on our food system yields vulnerable supply chains, unfairly compensated farmers and unprecedented farm debt, poorly-paid and badly-treated workers, environmental degradation, poor public health outcomes, and unequal access to affordable, healthy food. The truth is, industrial agriculture is an economically flawed system that only survives due to two factors: corporations’ ability to externalize their costs, and their use of myth-based marketing campaigns to persuade consumers and policymakers there is no other option.
November 2020
This report, led by food system expert Mary K. Hendrickson, PhD, provides the latest updated data on the state of concentration in the food and agriculture system, and outlines what happens when a few hands control the way billions of consumers, farmers, and farmworkers work and eat. It includes bold proposals for decentralizing our food system to move power out of the control of just a few.
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