﻿One dollar and ninety-two cents. That was the average price of one pound of chicken in 2019.
That's almost half of what it was in 1960. At the same time, the beef price fell by roughly 20%.
The world now produces more than three times the amount of meat as in 1970.
All this while more and more evidence reveals that meat production has a huge
negative impact on the environment, climate and human health. And here we are: more people are
eating meat because it’s cheap (and delicious!), but production on an industrial level is coming at
an exorbitant price. How did we end up here? How did meat prices get so cheap? Let’s take a look.
On average, Americans consumed 180 pounds of beef, pork and poultry in 2018, 10% more than
in 1970. Americans pay a lower per capita rate for most foods than anywhere else in the world.
Less than 10% of American household budget goes toward food. Meanwhile,
meat production results in carbon dioxide emission, methane and other
global warming gases. And also plays a role in deforestation and the overuse of fertilizers.
To understand how we got here, we need to look into the history of meat production
and how it has changed over the years.
In the early decades of the 20th century, in the Midwest of the US, farmers would raise animals.
They would then ship the live animals to stockyards in major metropolitan
areas around the country. Those animals would be processed there and later sold to local butchers,
who would cut them into steaks and sell to consumers.
Fast forward to Post World War II. The local butcher expanded into grocery stores. And the
technology to ship refrigerated foods became available. Grocery stores started to look for
suppliers that could ship the meat already processed, not the big animal pieces like
before. The packing houses then moved out of the metropolitan areas and built facilities close to
where animals were being raised. This was the beginning of the infrastructure we have today.
At this time, the industry started to adapt to consumers' taste. Instead of sending all
cuts of meat, they started shipping specific cuts. And the whole operation of raising,
slaughtering and processing into something easy to buy and cook moved very far from consumers.
All the streamlining that these changes demanded, contributed to making meat
production more efficient and therefore cheaper. But one other development would
become the most consequential change in the industry. We are talking about consolidation!
Today, the American market is dominated by three big companies: Tyson, JBS and Cargill. Together,
these three mega conglomerates control two-thirds of the beef and about half of
the chicken market in the United States. The pork market also has one other bigger player,
Smithfield, owned by chinese conglomerate WH Group. Together, they determine prices,
production conditions and even push for regulations.
The number of slaughterhouses has decreased by about 70% since 1976. From 2001 to 2019,
not one year went by without Tyson announcing another acquisition. As companies got larger
and production scaled up, the costs per unit decreased and created a cycle of cheaper prices,
more sales, more powerful companies and consequences with direct impact on consumers.
Consolidation led to big changes in the way meat is processed. It is important to understand that
the larger the plant, the lower the prices per pounding process. But a cheaper price also means
significant changes in the production chain. In this reality, everyone takes a hit. Animals,
workers and suppliers. Everybody has to sacrifice and suffer so the final product is cheap enough to
sell millions of pounds every day while still generating big profits for the conglomerates.
In the chicken industry, for example, the big companies control the entire process,
from chicken genetics to packaging. From 1925 to 2015 the average days to market
for a US chicken has been reduced from 112 to 48 days - at the same time the
average chickens weight has ballooned from a market weight of 2.5 pounds to 6.24 pounds.
With only one animal, the industry can have almost three times more meat in less than half the time.
As the industries consolidated, productivity growth and optimization
became the norm with a profound impact on the workers conditions.
This became very obvious during 2020, when the world tried to adapt to the covid-19 pandemic.
According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network, from April until the
end of November 2020, at least 555 meatpacking plants have had confirmed cases of Covid-19.
At least 49,454 workers on these plants have been infected. And 254 have died.
A huge pork facility belonging to Smithfield in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for example, became
one of the biggest covid hotspots of the sector. Out of the 3700 workers, 1294 tested positive.
Jobs like the so-called “gut snatchers”, people who slice open pigs and pull out the entrails,
require people to work in close quarters. If they follow social distancing rules, productivity would
be reduced and therefore scale effects of production and prices would be affected.
In the pork industry, 9 out of 10 hogs are slaughtered in plants that could process
more than one million animals a year. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants
are responsible for as much as 98 percent of slaughtering and processing in the United States.
Shutting down one of these plants is like shutting down an airport hub, and has a knock-on effect -
impacting the entire chain and therefore on the meat price and supplies throughout the country.
No matter what happens, a government always avoids endangering the country's food supply.
closing one of the giant factories never seemed to be an option.
And this gives the meat lobby immense power.
So it is no surprise that there are few regulations for this industry. In September
2019 the US Department of Agriculture simplified the oversight of slaughterhouses where pigs are
killed and processed. The new regulations changed two things: first, it gave local plant employees
more responsibility for inspections. Second: it removed limits on line-speed. That means they can
kill as many pigs as they want per minute. Prior to the new guidelines, factories were allowed to
slaughter a maximum of 1,106 hogs per hour. This limit does not exist anymore. Similar changes
happened in the poultry industry and are likely to happen in the beef sector in the near future.
Critics have also blamed the meat industry´s mega infrastructure for spreading diseases.
In 2018, for example, JBS USA ordered the largest recall of ground beef in U.S. history.
About 12 million pounds of contaminated beef infected with a virulent strain of salmonella
in 30 states made 403 people sick and 117 were hospitalized. After the recall,
less than 2 percent of the meat was recovered.
Abuse of power is another problem that arises from the development of the meat industry.
The Agriculture Department said that JBS underpaid family farmers and ranchers in 2019 at three
slaughterhouses in Colorado, Nebraska and Texas by claiming the cattle weighed less than they did,
delivering a huge loss to the families. They were fined $79,000 for this illegal practice.
Almost nothing for a company with a net revenue of roughly 40 billion dollars in 2019.
It’s almost impossible to hold these giants accountable.
The lobbying abilities of these meat producers are seemingly limitless.
According to the Washington post, JBS alone has spent 7.7 million dollar on lobbying. Meanwhile,
the company has won more than 900 million dollars in government meat contracts.
And JBS is not the only one wielding its power over government. The leverage that
these giant meat producers exercise over both Republicans and Democrats is huge. Basically,
no government official wants to collide with such important food suppliers.
They have the market in a stranglehold and are able to sometimes get away with serious problems,
like the environmental consequences of the production.
The british newspaper the Guardian published an article in July 2020 saying that there
are signs that meat giant JBS used cattle supplied from a farm in the Brazilian Amazon
which is under sanction for illegal deforestation. It was the fifth time
that the company was linked to such accusations. JBS, according to the article, denied the story.
In 2017, a report by Mighty, an environmental group, linked Tyson Foods to the widespread
manure and fertilizer pollution contaminating water in the Gulf of Mexico.
The report said that Tyson slaughters 35 million chickens, 125,000 heads of cattle every week.
And that five million acres of corn are needed to feed all the animals annually. It also
stated that this consumption resulted in Tyson generating 55 million tons of manure in one year,
with 104 million tons of pollutants dumped into waterways in one decade.
Mighty Earth also accused Cargill of operating a soy plantation on Indigenous land in Brazil
and being one of the US' top ten polluters. Cargill also denied any wrongdoing. Tyson
and Cargill also denied any wrongdoing.
The impact of meat on the environment is so big that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change has already stated that human diets have a fundamental influence on tackling climate change
and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Without any changes in our diet, the IPCC predicts that
CO2 emissions due to food production and consumption are expected to double by 2050.
If animal-sourced food could be completely avoided, a global decrease of up to eight
billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050 is possible. Zero animal meat consumption might not be realistic,
but there are alternatives. Plant-based meat, for example, could be part of the solution. But due
to the low price of animal meat, these products are still not nearly as competitive price-wise.
The average price for a plant-based meat sold in grocery stores in the US in 2019
was $9.87 per pound, 70% more than beef and even 5 times the price of chicken.
While the plant-based meat industry is still at the very beginning; making up about 0.5 percent
of meat sales in the U.S., the secret to success might be to copy the animal meat industry process.
Hope lies in more efficiency from the companies along with government subsidies. This might lead
to lower prices, but who knows... Until then, it’s everyone's responsibility to understand how
the system works and what is behind that very cheap pack of meat on the counter.
So that’s it for this video. How meat became so cheap.
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