In a subsequent speech, Harris blamed high grocery prices on large, consolidated food companies, which have raked in record profits, but offered few further details about what a price-gouging ban might entail. The campaign then added a policy platform to its website, repeating the pledge to install a national price gouging ban.

“As president, she will direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition,” the website states.

Republicans and pro-business groups pushed back immediately after the announcement. The National Grocers Association called the proposal a “solution in search of a problem,” while former President Donald Trump posted on social media about “Soviet style” price caps.

“If you think things are expensive now, they will get 100 times WORSE if Kamala gets four years as President,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The former president has also mentioned high food prices repeatedly in recent weeks; he informed Elon Musk, in an interview on X, that bacon prices are “four to five times” more expensive than they were a few years ago.

While Trump’s statement about bacon is false, there’s no question that groceries have become increasingly expensive. Food prices ballooned by 25 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), outstripping increases in other important spending categories like housing and medical costs.

And it’s clear that voters are not only taking notice of the high prices, but also increasingly see corporate profits and consolidation as part of the cause. In recent polling focused on voters in seven swing states, 56 percent said food was the hardest essential good to pay for. And 61 percent of respondents, including 63 percent of independents, blamed across-the-board high prices on corporate greed.

Few other goods and services are as omnipresent as food purchases, and food prices are often where everyday Americans feel economic shifts most immediately.

“It’s the most frequent purchase most households make,” said Dawn Thilmany, an agriculture and resource economics professor at Colorado State University. “You eat three times a day. You probably shop at least a couple times a week. There’s almost nothing else like it in our economy.”

In a tight presidential election, where nearly one in five voters is still undecided, food prices could be a key issue, but what can elected officials actually do to bring them down?

Consolidation and ‘Greedflation’

Supply chain disruptions, resulting shortages, and inflation have contributed to high food prices in recent years. Economists note that other factors, like increases in the minimum wage across the country, ballooning energy costs—inflated by the war in Ukraine—and changing consumer behavior have likely played a role. Some pandemic-era habits, like the newfound love for baking bread, and cooking at home in general, seem to have stuck, according to Thilmany. “Even controlling for inflation, we found that people are seemingly allocating a higher share of their budget to food spending,” she said.

But even as inflation has slackened in the past year, prices remain high, and some economists and progressive Democrats argue that large corporations have taken advantage of the recent economic disruptions to keep prices artificially high—a tactic known as “greedflation.”

A recent study by the Groundwork Collaborative found that “corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023,” and more than a third of the inflation since the start of pandemic—vastly outstripping the price growth attributable to corporate profits in recent decades. Corporations can do this, according to the report, thanks to decades of corporate consolidation, resulting in a lack of competition.

“From the fertilizer industry to the feed production industry to the grocery retail industry, all along this food chain, you have deeply concentrated markets with only a few major players,” said Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, “and that lack of competition means that at every point in the system, these companies don’t have to lower their prices.”

Policymakers can curb this by discouraging consolidation and encouraging competition. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, is attempting to block a $25 billion merger between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. A merger would allow Kroger to acquire its main rival, and the FTC argued in a hearing in Oregon earlier this year that the consolidation would be anti-competitive and push costs onto consumers.

Details from the hearing, meanwhile, show that food pricing isn’t all driven by inflation. In a March email to other company executives, Andy Groff, Kroger’s senior director for pricing, seemed to confirm that the grocery chain had raised its prices to higher levels than required by inflationary conditions. “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation,” Groff wrote. In response to questions from FTC lawyers about the email, Groff said that Kroger attempts to “pass through our inflation to consumers.” He also acknowledged that Kroger was able to raise prices in areas where it faced little competition without seeing a drop in sales.

Under Trump, consolidated corporations generally benefited. The Trump administration dissolved the USDA agency tasked with regulating anti-competitive practices in the livestock, poultry, meat, grain, and oilseed industries.

The Biden administration made some attempts to rein in consolidation. In 2022, for example, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at creating more competitive practices, especially in meat and poultry supply chains. Harris’s plans to go after “price gouging” fall in line with these initiatives.

The problem is deeply embedded in the U.S. food system, and it continues to have real impacts. In cities or regions with just a few large food distributors, the consumer costs of consolidation can be stark: USDA data from June shows that, in a few major Midwestern cities with notably scant competition in the dairy distribution supply chain, consumers were paying almost $1 more per gallon of milk, according to The Milkweed, a dairy industry newsletter.

Kansas City, for example, has virtually no competition among its milk producers. One distributor, Hiland Dairy, a joint venture between two large-scale dairy cooperatives, dominates the area Over the past two years, Kansas City has experienced the highest milk prices among 30 major cities, according to The Milkweed. In Chicago, milk prices increased in 2023, even as raw milk costs declined for the two major milk distributors that dominate the local market.

“The food industry is just full of cartels,” said Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. “And that’s what cartels do. They gouge.”

Extreme concentration can be seen everywhere in the food industry. Walmart sells approximately one in three grocery items nationwide—and more than half the groceries in dozens of regional markets. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef buy and process 85 percent of beef in the U.S. JBS, the largest meatpacker in the world, has agreed to multiple settlements in recent years related to bribery and price-fixing.

Similarly, in the egg industry, a few large corporate entities hoard the market; Cal-Maine alone controls about 20 percent of egg production in the U.S. This concentration allowed companies to keep egg prices high in 2022 and 2023, after supply chain issues and an avian flu outbreak cut into supply, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Massachusetts) office. Cal-Maine, with no reported avian flu cases in its operations, saw profits increase by 65 percent in late 2022.

“In times of crisis like we saw over the course of the pandemic and over this inflationary period, these companies, in many cases, have added to the prices that consumers or downstream purchasers are paying, because they can, because there’s no competition to put them down,” Mabud of Groundwork Collaborative said.

Other Legal Tools to Address Excess Prices

It is one of 38 states with similar laws on the books, including red states like Texas and Tennessee. In Tennessee, two Nashville-based state lawmakers—Sen. Charlane Oliver and Rep. Aftyn Behn—recently urged the state attorney general to join a multi-state collaboration task force with the USDA to address anti-competitive actions in the food industry.

“High prices at the grocery store have weighed heavily on Tennessee families, and they deserve to know that their state government is taking every possible step to ensure fairness in the marketplace,” Oliver said in a statement.

In some states, price hikes are illegal beyond a certain percentage increase. Others use standards like “grossly excessive” to evaluate the legality of sudden cost raises. In her recently released platform, Harris said that national price gouging legislation would build on the existing state laws. However, the patchwork nature of state price-gouging laws currently makes this challenging, given the diffuse nature of supply chains and distribution networks.

A bill introduced earlier this year by Senator Warren offers a glimpse of what legislative action might look like at the federal level. Warren’s bill would codify price gouging as an “unfair and deceptive” practice under federal law, allowing both the federal government and state attorney generals to tackle exploitative pricing nationwide.

The law would also target large corporations, those with at least $100 million in revenue. And during periods of severe stock-market shock, as during COVID or, say, during extreme natural disasters, the bill would require large, publicly traded companies to disclose extra information to the SEC, especially the cost of goods sold, gross margins, and pricing strategies.

This proposal and others would require an empowered FTC, one willing to use existing antitrust law and any new legislation to target large corporate entities. During the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan has aggressively used antitrust law to target monopolies and consolidation, including the Albertsons–Kroger merger. Since announcing her candidacy, Harris has been pressured by populist economists and the left wing of the Democratic party to keep Khan, while billionaire donors have urged Harris to get rid of her, seeking a more business-friendly administration.

Government leaders have other tools at their disposal as well. The American Prospect recently detailed a variety of anti-price gouging tactics, ranging from a vigorous corporate tax regime and expanded enforcement to counter “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices”—to a greater array of public, not-for-profit institutions like publicly owned grocery stores and credit unions.

Though details remain scant, Harris’s announcement against price gouging could have teeth. Her speeches to date suggest support for legislation similar to Warren’s bill, antitrust efforts against large corporations—including civil penalties—and possible federal support for small businesses. Trump, too, has said he’ll tackle inflation, though policy details are minimal.

Any solution will need to also factor in the impact that prices have on farmers. When commodity prices are low, or supply is too high, for example, a power dynamic widens, benefiting brokers in the middle and hurting farmers. Supply management, where farmers grow what’s needed and are paid fairly in the process, is one policy solution.

But those are long-term issues likely far from most voters’ minds. What many of them are thinking about now is the cost of food.

For Mabud, the fact that Harris’ first big economic announcement focuses on food prices is grounds for hope—especially when combined with a more vigorous FTC and broader conversations about policy tools to take on monopolies.

“Concentration is not just a theoretical concept,” she said. “It’s actually harming people, full stop.”

“The reason I’m heartened by the focus on the high cost of groceries,” Mabud went on, “is because it’s really emblematic of a broader problem in our economy—which is that corporations have too much power and people have too little power.”

The post Can Lawmakers Really Tackle High Food Prices? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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