Protecting Food. Empowering Whistleblowers.
Protecting Food. Empowering Whistleblowers.
In the final weeks of the Obama Administration, USDA releases a reduced set of three rules, known now as the “Farmer Fair Practice Rules” that center on key issues from the original 2008 Congressional mandate in the Farm Bill. These include issues like ensuring that farmer pay is fairly calculated, and ensuring that companies cannot retaliate against farmer whistleblowers for speaking out about industry conditions.
Sensing that regulation was inevitable, industry lobbyists took a back-door approach to block these rules from becoming law. For five years in a row the industry heavily lobbied individual members of Congress to add the infamous “GIPSA Riders” into the budget appropriations process, preventing USDA from releasing the rules.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report highlighting several failures of Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) to protect farmers under the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA). These included failure to investigate farmer cases, and failure to investigate companies’ anti-competitive practices.
Despite the existence of the PSA laws, the increasing power of major meat companies takes a toll and decades passed in which USDA lacked political will to enforce these laws on behalf of farmers and ranchers. The agency responsible for enforcing the PSA was at this time GIPSA.
Technology drives forward a new trend of widespread concentration in meat and poultry. The “Confined Animal Feeding Operation” or CAFO starts to take hold across these industries. A CAFO is an enclosed house where livestock and poultry are kept, watered, and fed, and enables thousands of animals to be housed in a small amount of space.
Following pressure from farmers and their advocates, live poultry dealers are added to the Packers and Stockyards Act, giving USDA authority to also oversee big companies’ practices in the chicken industry.