Western Organizing Review

In This Issue:

Healthy ag markets lead to healthy rural communities

Healthy competition leads to healthy agricultural markets, which leads to healthy rural communities, farms and ranches, was part of the message shared with over 95 congressional offices in Washington, D.C. WORC leaders, Shane Kolb of Dakota Rural Action and Dan Teigen of Northern Plains Resource Council, joined 25 other farmers and ranchers from 20 organizations to urge Congress to include a competition title in the upcoming farm bill.

The two ranchers teamed up with poultry growers from the South, hog producers in the Midwest, dairy producers from New England, organic producers, tobacco growers and other ranchers to deliver a unified message.

"Our diverse interests and backgrounds are all unified by the underlying problems of market concentration and the need for healthy, functional markets,” Teigen said in response to the success of the fly-in.

“The problems we are facing affect a widespread group of people and places. It is only fitting that an alliance reflecting that diversity comes together with a comprehensive solution,” Teigen added.

Competition Title

A comprehensive Competittion Title includes eight points:

Captive Supply Reform Act
Prohibition on Packer-Owned Livestock
Fairness Standards for Agricultural Contracts
Clarification of “Undue Preferences” in the Packers & Stockyards Act
Closing Poultry Loopholes in the Packers & Stockyards Act
Bargaining for Contract Farmers
Livestock Mandatory Price Reportings
Mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling

Find out more information about these points and what you can do to make it part of the upcoming farm bill by logging on to www.worc.org where you will find fact sheets and detailed information on each of the points in the platform.

The comprehensive solution would return healthy functioning markets by:

Limiting packer control and manipulation of livestock markets

Increasing fairness in agricultural contracts and markets

Assuring adequate market information and transparency for producers and consumers

One of the major provisions of the platform includes the Captive Supply Reform Act, which would require packers to offer a firm base price on forward contracts and to bid against each other to win those contracts.

“This provision is especially important to WORC since we have been championing the proposal for over 10 years,” Kolb said. “The Captive Supply Reform Act and other provisions of the competition title proposal would simply update the Packers and Stockyards Act to deal with the current manipulative contracts. Agriculture is changing and we need a farm bill that changes with it.”

Teigen points out that the Competition Title benefits consumers. “If the market is in good shape, farmers and ranchers are in good shape and they can produce a good product. This ultimately provides a product at a good price and quality for the consumers.”
—Jeri Lynn Bakken