by Diana O. Potter, VEGWORLD Senior Editor
As we reported in the January/February 2020 issue of VEGWORLD, in December 2019 Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced a bill in the Senate, the Farm System Reform Act (FSRA), intended to transition the nation’s agriculture system away from factory farming and curb the most harmful elements of those operations to the animals, the environment, and our health.
Clearly this is much-needed legislation, since 99% of all animal products in America are factory-farmed and the industry is dominated by just three multi-national meat producing giants: Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and JBS, whose enormous profits depend on large-scale factory farming.
Just as clearly, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) thinks so, too. On May 7, she announced she is co-sponsoring Sen. Booker’s bill.
Warren is said to be supporting Booker’s bill in response to the revelations about meatpacking plant abuses of animals and workers that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. “For years, regulators looked the other way while giant multinational corporations crushed competition in the agriculture sector and seized control over key markets,” Warren said. “The COVID-19 crisis will make it easier for Big Ag to get even bigger, gobble up smaller farms, and lead to fewer choices for consumers.”
The bill is also co-sponsored by Representative Rohit Khanna (D-CA), who has introduced a companion bill to FSRA in the House. “Giant meatpackers cannot be permitted to continue to profit off of the labor of family farmers, consolidating the food industry to the point that our supply chain is threatened,” Khanna said. “Congress must step in to ensure an honest market, or risk losing another historic industry to the hands of big corporations.”
The Farm System Reform Act includes:
- Beginning to phase out the primary operation that keeps both meat and dairy production running at full tilt: CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations. FSRA targets the biggest CAFOs, with the job to be completed by 2040.
- Banning the opening of new CAFOs and limiting the growth of those now in operation.
- Holding large meatpacking operations responsible for the pollution they cause.
- Freeing small-scale animal farmers from the tyranny of large corporations, which bind the farmers contractually and often exploit them.
- Providing $100 billion over 10 years to help CAFO owners transitioned out of that business to enter more environmentally friendly and animal-protective types of agriculture.
As Booker said when he introduced the bill in the Senate, “Our food system was not broken by the pandemic and it was not broken by independent family farmers. It was broken by large, multinational corporations like Tyson, Smithfield, and JBS that, because of their buying power and size, have undue influence over the marketplace and over public policy.”
Summing up, Warren said, “We need to attack this consolidation head-on and give workers, farmers, and consumers bargaining power in our farm and food system. I’m glad to partner with Senator Booker and Representative Khanna to start reversing the hyper-concentration in our farm economy.”
