Source: Susan Kelly, MEATINGPLACE, 7/8/19


An analysis of pork purchasing contracts awarded through USDA’s trade mitigation program to help U.S. farmers hurt by ongoing trade wars has found JBS USA won the largest share with an average bid that was significantly below its rivals.

The analysis by the nonprofit Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting found JBS bid an average of $2.56 per pound for five-pound pork loin cuts, compared to its competitors’ average bid of $3.80 per pound. JBS won more than 26% of the $300 million that USDA has allocated to pork so far, the report said.

Rounding out the top 10 companies receiving the most trade mitigation funds spent on pork, according to the center’s analysis, are: Goodman Food Products, Lakeside Foods Inc., Tyson Foods Inc., Mistica Foods LLC, Chicago Meat Authority Inc., Proportion Foods, Seaboard Foods LLC, Calumet Diversified Meats Inc., Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. and Native American Enterprises LLC.
Some senators have criticized the trade relief program for awarding purchasing contracts subsidized by American taxpayers to foreign-owned companies, namely JBS and Smithfield parent WH Group. USDA subsequently granted Smithfield’s request to terminate its contract.

“We urge you to stop making trade mitigation commodity purchases that benefit foreign-owned companies,” a group of nine senators, led by Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., wrote in a May 29 letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

USDA provided Perdue’s response to the criticism in an email to Meatingplace:
“We’re buying U.S. produced agricultural products. The premise behind procurement is to take product off the market and support prices. This will help U.S. farmers,” said Perdue. “These are legal companies operating in the United States. This is no different than people buying Volkswagens or other foreign autos that are manufactured in the United States, where their executives may have been guilty of some issue along the way. They still buy the cars.

"JBS is a Brazilian company operating in the United States, buying product from U.S. farmers," he continued in the email statement. "What we do through these companies – it’s not to help the companies – they offer a bid to us based on buying U.S. farmers’ production. This helps U.S. farmers by supporting prices. Companies are able to buy from our farmers more because we are buying that product and taking it off the market.”

A JBS spokesperson told the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting that the company’s purpose in participating in the federal program was to support U.S. producer prices, and that its U.S. pork plants work with more than 3,165 pork producers, paying $3.5 billion in livestock payments each year.

In an interview with CNN, Perdue emphasized that the federal program bought U.S. pork grown by American producers that was processed by JBS. “Every pound of that pork came from American producers,” Perdue told CNN. JBS operates in the United States, he continued, and “farmers sell to them everyday.”

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