[FOX] Ground beef just hit a record $6.92 a pound, nearly 60% more than Americans were paying just five years ago.
For millions of families, beef isn't a ribeye at a steakhouse; it's the largest source of protein in their diet. It's hamburgers on the grill, taco night, meatloaf, a roast in the crockpot.
America didn't forget how to raise cattle. We made it harder to do it, and American families are paying the price for a country that won't let its own ranchers feed it.
The Trump administration is attempting to bring relief quickly. A temporary order took effect Sept. 1, expanding lower-tariff access for 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef trimmings, putting more beef in the market while the herd rebuilds. It did not go over well in ranching country. Producers argue that flooding the market with cheaper foreign beef pushes cattle prices down at the very moment American ranchers need stronger prices to justify rebuilding the herd.
But the question has never been how much beef we should import. The real question is why it can be cheaper to raise and process beef on the other side of the world, ship it thousands of miles to America, and sell it here than to simply produce it at home.
Yes, American wages are higher, American beef is also the best in the world, and Americans have shown they'll pay for that. But none of that fully answers the question.
Here's what does: foreign beef can cross an ocean and land on a shelf in New York City more easily than a Nebraska rancher's beef can cross the state line into Iowa. A rancher who has his cattle processed under his own state's inspection program, one the USDA has certified as equal to the federal standard, still can't sell that meat one mile over the border. The bureaucracy has built a system where importing is simpler than selling to a neighboring state.
And that is only part of the problem.
Just look at beef processing. Four companies, two of them Brazilian-owned, control roughly 85% of American beef processing capacity, up from 36% in 1980. This isn't the free market. Crushing regulations, excessive permitting, and the capital cost of running a federally compliant plant are so steep that only a handful of operations can absorb them. This is a government-enabled monopoly. A small processor can't open a competing plant, so the giants stay giants, and cattle producers finishing and selling fed cattle across enormous stretches of the country are left with one or two buyers. A producer without competition for offtake doesn't set the price. He takes the only one he's handed.
The same scenario shows up again when a rancher tries to tap the free market and sell straight to locals who actually want his beef. A neighbor who wants to buy a quarter of beef directly from the rancher down the road can't just buy it. The animal has to go through an inspected facility, and if the nearest one is hours away and booked out for months, that transaction simply doesn't happen. Ranchers who could be selling directly to consumers at a fair price, cutting out the distant packer entirely, are blocked not by a lack of demand but by a lack of anywhere nearby to legally get the job done.
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