7 - The State of American Competition Law with Respect to the Food Chain

Summary

Chapter 7 focuses on the situation in the US, exploring American competition policy with respect to the agriculture and the food system. Public enforcement is split among the Federal Trade Commission, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture. This split creates additional discontinuities in enforcement actions. This Chapter finds that antitrust enforcement has been weak and inconsistent in the United States with respect to anticompetitive conduct and market structure affecting farmers. Buyer power issues have been largely, but not entirely, ignored. The Department of Agriculture has failed to use its authority to protect farmers. Despite the apparent promise of the Obama administration in its early months in office, the trend for the last three plus decades has been an overall failure to protect the long-term interests of producers and consumers in a workably competitive agriculture-food system.