Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 12/23/16


Cutting production to fend historic losses during and after the Great Recession in 2008, to poultry producers, was simple supply-and-demand economics. But to some consumers and customers still paying high prices for chicken even as production costs have fallen, producers are a “cartel,” colluding to artificially buoy high prices in order to enjoy record profits.

Class-action antitrust lawsuits filed in September say chicken companies accounting for at least 90 percent of U.S. chicken production have, contrary to a competitive market, lined up on phone calls and closed meetings and shared each other’s data in order to coordinate extended supply cuts and maintain historic profits. 

That, and ensuing media attention given to the questionable method by which the Georgia Dock index prices chicken, don’t shed the most favorable light on an industry that already has gotten its fair share of attention from the Department of Justice.

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