Farm bill displeases meat packers

The US Senate voted this week to maintain a ban on meatpackers raising livestock or overseeing independent feedlots, despite warnings it could cause huge disruptions in the livestock markets.

On a 53-46 vote, senators rejected an amendment that would have replaced the ban with a nine-month study of the matter. It was a slightly more decisive vote than the initial 51-46 roll call vote on 14 December to institute the ban.

South Dakota Democratic Senator Tim Johnson, author of the ban, said it was needed to muzzle the power of big packers and save ranchers from becoming "low-paid employees on their own land" carrying out instructions from corporations.

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, who proposed the nine-month study, said the ban was so loosely written it could cause immense disruptions by outlawing popular and innovative methods for marketing livestock.

The ban was part of a wide-ranging $45 billion (€51.4bn) farm bill expected to pass the Senate by midweek.

"I think we're still going to try to work on it in (the House-Senate) conference,"​ said Chandler Keys of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association which opposed the ban.

Beef and pork packers said that revisions to a controversial aspect of the US Senate farm bill on Tuesday were not enough to change their previous opposition to the proposal, because it would still force them to stop raising cattle and pigs.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, told reporters there were only a dozen major amendments left. The bill should be passed by this week, he said.Written every few years, farm bills bundle myriad programmes - crop subsidy, anti-hunger, farm export, agricultural research and rural development - that cost tens of billions of dollars a year.The four largest meat packers ConAgra Foods, Cargill, Farmland Industries and Tyson Foods, raise or hold contracts on one-third of the cattle they slaughter, according to a recent Agriculture Department report.

"I don't want to collapse the livestock industry based on 'maybes' and 'mights,'"​ Craig said, in arguing against the ban.The American Meat Institute warned that the ban "would force massive asset divestitures"​ which would drive down cattle and hog prices. It also could jeopardise new-style marketing chains that call on producers to provide animals with particular traits.

Beef packers would have six months to dispose of their herds under the Johnson amendments and pork packers would have 18 months.The amendment would exempt packers who account for less than 2 per cent of the slaughter of any given animal and packers owned by co-operatives whose members grow animals for slaughter by the packer.

While large farm groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union supported the ban, it was opposed by meat packers, the National Pork Council and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.