HHS Nominee RFK Jr. Set to Break-up “Big Ag Monopolies”
Written by Chriss W. Street
Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President-elect Trump’s first Cabinet pick to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, is cranking up his Make America Healthy Again campaign to target “Big Ag Monopolies.”
President Biden’s disastrous green-energy initiatives, combined with increasingly burdensome regulatorymandates have squeezed small American family farmers profitability.
Additionally, the Biden Administration has allowed global “Big Ag” interests to use their monopoly scale and financial clout to import cheap agricultural commodities that by not being subject to the same environmental and regulatory costs have been under-cutting U.S. farmers and ranchers.
As a result, the United States since 2022 to suffer its first agricultural trade deficits in 63 years. A $2 billion deficit in 2022 leapt to $20.7 billion in 2023, about $30.5 billion in 2024, and is expected to top $42 billion in 2025.
This new string of competitive trade losses is especially troubling because it happened during a period of favorable U.S. weather patterns across the Mid-West that produced bumper grain crop yields and should have been record farm profits.
With a Republican majority in the Senate and bipartisan support from rural Democrats, President-elect Donald Trump moved in the first week after the election to nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump gave Kennedy marching orders on Truth Socialto take on “industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health."
Trump has expressed full support for HHS to play a big role in helping ensure that “everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country.”
The ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda will face its first major test from “Big Ag” in the upcoming five-year Farm Bill renewal that authorizes an array of price supports, crop insurance, food stamp programs, conservation programs, rural housing support, energysubsidies, forestry initiatives and government-backedloans to farmers.
Due to massive increases of imports coupled with a slew of mergers since Covid-19 pandemic, the food industry is now one of the most consolidated sectors of the U.S. economy.
The Farm Bill was originally focused on retaining small family farmers, but the vast federal resources now mostly help giant food conglomerates through financing, insurance, and subsidy programs for vastfarms and huge feedlots.
Democrats tend to mine the Farm Bill to distribute subsidized food stamps for urban dwellers, while rural Republicans have focused on subsidies for agribusiness scale corn, wheat and soybean farmers.
Historically, America was a global powerhouse in agricultural exports due to controlling the most fertile land in the world and being blessed with the greatest water availability on the planet.
But the United States is not only a net importer in terms of the value of agricultural commodities, the U.S. cattle herd now is at its lowest point since 1951. The United States has managed to de-industrialize manufacturing and seems now on the cusp of de-farming rural America.
Many blame Big Ag Monopolies that operate as the middleman takes larger and larger percentages of value, undermining domestic producers that increasingly see less and less reward for taking risk of producing.
About 85% of cattle processing is controlled by JBS, National Beef, Tyson, and Cargill. But that statistic understates the fact that meat processing is a regionalbecause livestock cannot be shipped across the country.
Big Ag consolidation is also vertically integrated with patents for specific biological traits, firms like John Deere to control farm data, to giant buyers Sodexo and Walmart controlling prices.
On the anti-trust front, Big Ag consolidations may be coming to a close. A judge recently blocked the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, and there is litigation to revive Robinson-Patman Act against price discrimination.
Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS will also get substantial help taking on Big Ag Monopolies from Brooke Rollins that Trump recently selected as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Rollins served in Trump's first administration as director of the Domestic Policy Council, and she is currently President of Trump-sponsored America First Policy Institute.
Trump stressed: “Brooke's commitment to support the American farmer, defense of American food self-sufficiency, and the restoration of agriculture-dependent American small towns is second to none.”