Agriculture and Antitrust
Enforcement
Brent Hueth, Director
University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives
Consolidation
Concentration ratios of grocery
store sales
Concentration ratios of 4 largest
meat processing firms
70
90
60
80
70
50
60
40
Top 4
30
Top 20
20
50
1982
40
2006
30
20
10
10
0
0
1982 1992 2002 2005
Beef
Pork
Poultry
Farm Prices Rising More Slowly Than Overall Prices
Indices of Prices Received by Farmers for All Farm Products and Economy
Wide Prices, 1982-2009.
0.14
0.13
1982
1987
1992
1997
2002
2007
0.12
0.11
0.10
0.09
0.08
0.07
0.06
Consumers Spending Less on Food
Household expenditures on food as a share of disposable income, 19822007.
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1987
1992
1997
2002
2007
Farms Getting More Efficient
Number of farms (1000’s) that account for 50% of total farm sales
nationally.
Government Responds
• Model Producer Protection Act
(2000)
• GAO Report (GAO-09-746R
Concentration in Agriculture, 2009)
• DOJ/USDA Workshops (2010)
DOJ/USDA Antitrust Workshops
Cooperatives, DOJ, and Antitrust
Enforcement
Adversaries or Allies?
Two Views
Sapiro
“We don’t say that the
purpose of cooperative
marketing is to introduce
any economy in the physical
handling of grain… we are
interested in raising the
basic level of the price of
wheat”
Nourse
Cooperatives are
“…a means to improve the lot
of both farmer and
consumer by improving the
efficiency of the economic
machine.”