A Good Reason for Rural Rage: The Crushing Power of Corporate Meat

It’s no secret that rural Americans are angry with the Washington elite. Less discussed are some of the sensible reasons for it. For far too long, family farms have been crushed under the monopolistic power of Big Ag. And for decades, politicians from both parties either turned a blind eye to the oligopolies that rule over rural America — or climbed right into bed with them.

Take the chicken industry, for instance. With just four companies controlling over half of poultry production in the country, chicken processors have been able to collude to suppress wages, fix prices and retaliate against farmers who speak out. . .

That’s not a recipe for a healthy democracy — or a healthy food system, for that matter — and rural Americans know it. Some 88 percent of rural voters in battleground states say they would be more favorable toward a candidate who supports “cracking down on meat processing monopolies and ensuring local businesses can compete,” according to a poll this year by the Rural Democracy Initiative, a funding collaborative that marshals resources for rural communities.

Which brings me to the question of why Kamala Harris isn’t highlighting this administration’s admirable track record of taking on Big Ag. Since President Biden signed an executive order promoting competition in 2021, this administration has done more to level the playing field for chicken farmers than any in recent memory — but you wouldn’t know it from listening to stump speeches. . .

But news of how this administration has championed family farmers hasn’t broken through. . .

“For whatever reason, they haven’t used the bully pulpit to highlight this work,” he said.

Ms. Harris is doing surprisingly well in rural areas anyway. She received 39 percent support in a new poll to be published Monday by the Rural Democracy Initiative, which surveyed 3,125 likely voters in 10 battleground states, 1,944 of whom were from rural areas and small cities. Compared with the 30 percent support that Mr. Biden scraped together in a poll this spring, it’s a big shift, led by Black people and people of color, women and young voters. . .

Farmers already know this. They have been fighting for antitrust enforcement for decades, and have been deeply disappointed. They thought they had a champion in Barack Obama, who promised reforms and held a series of extraordinary hearings on the subject. Farmers and ranchers took big risks to testify about abuses they endured at the hands of the oligopolies they had to do business with. But the pushback from Big Ag was so severe that the Obama administration watered down its proposals. . .

Farmers felt burned. . .

“They are very angry,” he said. “People just kind of gave up on government. A lot of those family farmers turned into Trump voters.”

The challenge now is to convince farmers that it will be different this time around. There are signs that the current effort is slowly rebuilding trust. In North Carolina, a battleground state with more than 4,600 poultry farms, Aaron Johnson, a policy co-director for the nonprofit farm-advocacy organization RAFI, says the farmers he works with appreciate the progress, even if they aren’t Democrats.

“I have seen them evolve in terms of realizing who is on their side and who is not,” he told me.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/rural-rage-harris.html