Agricultural Contracting, Competition, and Antitrust
نویسنده
چکیده
Two powerful and related trends in the organization of U.S. farming are: production is shifting to larger family farms and agricultural contracts are increasingly being used to guide the production and marketing of farm commodities. These combined structural changes affect productivity and costs in agriculture and in the broader food sector, and also affect the financial returns to farmers, benefiting some while harming others. Structural changes have also led to initiatives, including legal challenges and legislative proposals, primarily in livestock industries, aimed at limiting the use or ameliorating some effects of contracts. Cattle feeders sued meatpackers over packers’ use of contracts to influence prices in contract and cash market sales.1 Congress passed, and USDA implemented, a law mandating price reporting of livestock and meat sales, aimed at improving the information available to market participants in the wake of sharp declines in cash market volumes and related voluntary reporting in the late 1990s. In the current Congress (109th), one bill (H.R. 4713 and S. 818) would prohibit, except within seven days of slaughter, packer ownership of livestock, or arrangements that give packers “supervisory, managerial, or operational control” of livestock. Another (S. 960 and H.R. 4257) would prohibit the use in livestock transactions of forward contracts that do not set firm prices in dollar terms (no formulas); forward contracts that cover more than 40 cattle or 30 hogs; and forward contracts that are not offered for bid in a public
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