Mother Jones: The Meat Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Obama's Massive Trade Deal
Tom Philpott | Wed Oct. 7, 2015
The US meat industry scored a big victory this week when world leaders hammered out an agreement that would reduce trade barriers across the Pacific: from the United Sates, Canada, Mexico, Peru, and Chile on this side to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Singapore on the other.
President Barack Obama has made passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the TPP, the signature goal of his second term. Now it goes to Capitol Hill for approval—which it will likely get, given that back in June, Congress granted the president "fast track" authority to negotiate trade deals, meaning that it will be considered in up-down, simple-majority votes in both chambers, with no chance of amendment or filibuster.
So how would the TPP affect Big Meat in the United States? The industry is currently facing stagnant domestic demand for its product as Americans eat less meat. The TPP would open markets in countries that currently protect domestic farmers with tariffs. Japan, for example, agreed to slash its tariff on imported beef from 38 percent to 9 percent over the next 15 years—likely making it much easier for American importers to gain a foothold. Because the pact has been negotiated in secret and few details about it have been released, it's impossible to estimate how big of a boost the TPP will provide to US meat purveyors. But it already has industry groups doing the money dance...snip
...Of course, when asked why they're eating less meat, Americans commonly cite a desire to reduce the environmental and social impacts of industrial-scale meat production: everything from animal cruelty to fouled water and air to labor abuses at slaughterhouses and pillaged local economies. An export boom will only intensify those trends...
Two foreign companies—Brazil's JBS and China's Shuanghui—now control nearly half of US pork production...
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MORE: http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/10/trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-meat-and-gmo-industries-shuanghui-china
NPPC Confident TPP Deal Good For U.S. Pork
WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 5, 2015 – The National Pork Producers Council expressed confidence that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement negotiators concluded in Atlanta will benefit all sectors of the U.S. economy and will provide enormous new market opportunities for high-quality American pork products...
http://www.nppc.org/2015/10/nppc-confident-tpp-deal-good-for-u-s-pork/
Related: Bacon Is About to Get More Expensive
—By Tom Philpott | Wed Jul. 8, 2015 | Mother Jones
While Americans celebrated Independence Day last weekend, the meat industry was partaking of another time-tested tradition: concentration. That's the economists' term for when one big company buys another, resulting in an industry dominated by just a handful of players. And that's what happened when Brazilian meat giant JBS plunked down $1.45 billion to buy the US pork interests of global agribusiness behemoth Cargill...
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/07/bacon-jbs-cargill-pork
