Justice Department and USDA to farmers: Anti-competitive practices in the food sector will stop

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This post corrects an earlier version.

During the Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s opening round-table discussion, it quickly became clear that the changing landscape of the nation’s farm country -- and growing concerns over the consolidation of the food sector -- was a key area that had grabbed regulators and prosecutors’ attentions.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack pointed out that, back in the 1920s, a single farmer grew enough crops or raised enough livestock to feed 20 people. “Now,” he said, “a single farmer is responsible for feeding 150 people. Farming makes up 1 out of every 12 jobs in this country.”

But 11% of farm households’ income comes from farming, indicating the large percentage of off-farm income required for many to stay on the farm. That is a problem, he said, that “needs to be examined.”

That sentiment was met with cheers inside a conference center at the Des Moines Area Community College. Every seat was full, with hundreds of farmers dressed in flannel shirts -- some of whom had taken of break from planting in the fields to attend -- and crowds of food and commercial workers clad in sunshine yellow United Food and Commercial Workers union shirts.

Scattered here and there were dozens of federal and state officials in dark suits -- and somber officials from some of the companies, including seed giant Monsanto Co., that are being accused of being at the root of the problem.

“I’m reminded of President Eisenhower’s observation that ‘farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield,’ ” U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. told the crowd. “His words remain true today. And in the decades since he spoke them, the challenges facing farmers and other leaders across our agriculture industry have become even more difficult.”

Time and again, panelists underscored how the government was going to push for more transparency in the food sector’s business practices. But it was the issue of competition -- and veiled nods to the Justice Department’s current probe into Monsanto’s marketing practices -- that took up most of the first hour of the public meeting.

Assistant U.S. Att. Gen. Christine Varney, whom many people here point to as the person spearheading the Justice Department’s ramped-up probe into big-business antitrust concerns, said the department would “carefully and closely scrutinize every single merger” of the food sector that come before her office. She promised that her office was undertaking “unrelenting quest to find the correct balance” within the agricultural industry.

That would mean, she said, fair deals for farmers, fair pay for agriculture workers in processing factories and ensuring the public had “food on their table that’s safe, healthy and a decent price.”

[Corrected at 1:45 p.m. March 16: An earlier version of this post quoted Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack as saying that 11% of the nation’s economic income is earned by family farmers. As noted above, he said that 11% of farm households’ income comes from farming.]

-- P.J. Huffstutter