Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) slammed big meat’s monopolies in an interview with Blaze TV‘s Matt Kibbe on Wednesday.
“80 percent of all the meat that is consumed in the United States goes through four companies, and these companies have monopolized the meat processing business in the United States,” Massie said. “Two of them are wholly owned entities: one’s owned by the Chinese and one is owned by the Brazilians, and what we have now is not really the product of capitalism, this isn’t an efficient result of capitalism.”
Massie went on to suggest removing onerous USDA regulations on meat sale was the answer to fighting these foreign monopolies, and allowing small American farmers to expand beyond producing niche markets.
“The lobbyists for the big meat packers, the four that control the industry right now, they want these regulations, they’d probably invite more regulations if they could, because what they understand is that it keeps the small guys from competing, and so they want a meat processing facility that might have only ten employees to be regulated in the same way that their thousand employee facility is regulated,” he continued. “By making sure that the USDA never relaxes requirements for the smaller entities they have forced the smaller entities into this niche area of food processing.”
He then went on to promote his PRIME Act as a solution, particularly in the wake of the ongoing national meat supply chain problems that have followed the coronavirus pandemic.
“What my bill says is that if the farmer and the processor and the consumer are all in the same state, and the product doesn’t cross state lines, and everybody is complying with state and county and city laws, then the USDA doesn’t need to be involved in that transaction,” he said.
“The regulations that are placed on these Chinese and Brazilian companies that slaughter thousands of animals and ship them all over the world don’t need to be the same regulations that are placed on the small local guys.”
I really hope this Prime Act gets passed. It would help America be more food secure I believe.In my mind it way past due. We contacted a Butcher not to far from us and they are having supply problems to,due to the meat processing plants being backed up.
Pass Massie’s Prime Act. We need to control our own meats and food. Not some foreign country. We need our food supply to be in the people’s hands on USA!