Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, Iowa is home to 88,000 family farmers. These farmers make up the economic foundation of our rural communities, and farmers are the leaders who make up the councils and the school boards across our State. So when we see economists estimate a 20- percent drop in livestock and grain producers' revenue due to COVID-19, it isn't just our farmers who are concerned; it is our whole State.

In the CARES Act, we provided USDA with $24.5 billion to address this loss in revenue; however, we know that even with this funding, the supply chain disruptions from COVID-19 will force some agriculture producers to miss payments, and ultimately some will be forced to sell their family farms.

The consequences of COVID-19 shutdowns have injected uncertainty that we haven't seen since the farmer crisis of the 1980s.

During my time in the Senate, I have always tried to be a vocal advocate for the importance of a safe, affordable, and secure supply of food. But now our country's food supply chain is facing disruptions never envisioned before. As processing plants have shut down due to employees being sick, the supply chain disruptions are being felt by farmers and, of course, by consumers.

I ought to tie the two together because it is so important. The old saying that we are only nine meals away from a riot--we haven't had that in the United States yet, and I hope we don't have it, but when you see short supplies of toilet paper and people fighting over toilet paper in the supermarket, it wouldn't surprise you that they would fight more for food.

With as much as 40 percent of the slaughter capacity at our packing plants down for the past month, beef prices have doubled for the consumer. That has caused meat shortages in fast food chains, and grocery stores across the country have been forced to limit meat purchases per consumer.

If that is not bad enough, at the same time, livestock producers with livestock that is ready to sell have been turned away by meat processors. Even if producers are lucky enough to sell, the prices they are getting are well below the cost of production, and they are losing money on every animal they sell.

I have received a large volume of calls and emails from Iowans and member organizations expressing concern that the current discrepancy between high shelf prices and increased losses for cattle producers just doesn't make any sense. I share the concerns of these farmers, and I take their claims of market manipulation very seriously.

President Trump is on top of this issue, and this past week, he echoed a request that I made of the Attorney General last month to examine the current structure of the beef meatpacking industry and investigate potential market and price manipulation. Holding the four large meatpacking companies accountable is the least we can ask of Federal officials, and I thank President Trump for talking to Barr about that as well.

The fact is, over 80 percent of the feedlot cattle in the United States are slaughtered by the four largest meatpacking companies: Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and No. 4, National Beef. Because these companies control a large percentage of slaughter and processing capacity in the United States, they have the unique ability to influence the price of live cattle. They use tactics such as bottlenecking processing speeds, importing foreign meat, utilizing private forward-formula contracts, and piling up meat in cold storage to delay the need to purchase live cattle from the family farmer.

I am glad the President asked the Department of Justice to look into these schemes to see if any of this behavior is illegal--the same request I made to Barr about a month ago.

Independent producers will always struggle with negotiating prices when there are only four large, multinational corporations that control prices; however, in Iowa, it is a little different. Our producers sell 50 percent of their cattle through negotiated cash prices. This allows for market transparency so that producers know the market price of cattle, and the price more accurately reflects the cost the producers incur when raising livestock. However, this isn't the case across the entire United States, as more than 80 percent of all cattle are sold through formula contracts and/or the cattle futures market. These private contracts don't allow for price transparency and hide the true value of production from the rest of the marketplace.

It happens that this is not a new problem. In fact, 18 years ago, I introduced a bill with former Senator Feingold from Wisconsin that would have helped producers gain leverage by mandating that a percentage of a packer's weekly slaughter come from a negotiated cash price. I introduced that bill every Congress until 2009, but, sadly, at that time, not enough of my colleagues saw the need for a transparent marketplace.

That need is much more obvious today because conversations across the country have started to shift, and people's opinion about four big meatpackers controlling 80 percent of the market--it looks like more of a problem when farmers are losing a lot of money when they sell their cattle and the price for the consumer goes up at the supermarket. Lawmakers have begun to realize that in order to have a sustainable supply of meat in our country, we need to restore transparency in the marketplace and protect the market from collapsing when there is a supply chain disruption.

Let me repeat something I said at the beginning--nine meals away from a riot and people fighting about who is going to buy the last roll of toilet paper in the supermarket. We can't let that same thing happen with food, so today I come to the floor to submit my bill to foster efficient markets and increase competition and transparency among packers that purchase livestock from our producers. The only change to that Feingold-Grassley bill is to increase the amount of mandated negotiated cash trade to 50 percent from the original 25 percent in that bill that Feingold and I cooperated on. This change is needed to increase price discovery for producers across the country.

I am proud to lead this effort with Senator Tester of Montana and will work with my colleagues in the Senate and particularly those on the Senate Agriculture Committee to make sure this bill becomes law. Without significant action by Congress, our independent beef producers will not be able to stay in business. I believe the time to act is now. Failure to act is failing our independent producers.

If there is one silver lining that could come out of COVID-19, it may be that consumers will start to understand where their food comes from. Food does not come from grocery stores; it comes from the tens of thousands of farmers and independent producers who bust their backs day and night to ensure families across the country have an adequate supply of food.

Farmers are 2 percent of the population who provide for the other 98 percent, and they even provide for more than 98 percent of Americans--a lot of it is exported

I urge my colleagues to support my legislation being introduced today and do right by the producers who provide the food that we all eat. ______

By Ms. COLLINS (for herself, Mr. Menendez, and Mr. Grassley):

S. 3703. A bill to amend the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act to improve the prevention of elder abuse and exploitation of individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

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