Foodopoly by Hauter Wenonah

Author:Hauter, Wenonah [Hauter, Wenonah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595587947
Publisher: New Press, The

10

MODERN-DAY SERFS

Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Most Americans have no idea that the chicken they eat is raised by a farm family that makes an average of $15,000 a year—that is, if none of their back-breaking labor is counted. Contrast this with the amount of profit made by KFC or a company like Tyson Foods.

According to Mike Weaver, a contract grower who is the president of the Contract Poultry Growers Association of the Virginias, when a consumer buys “a twelve-piece bucket of chicken at KFC or other chains, it costs around $26.99 [price depends on the store location] or thereabouts. Of that $26.99, the integrator [poultry company] receives around $3 to $5 depending on the price of chicken when it was bought. KFC gets around $21, and the grower who spent at least six weeks raising that chicken gets 25 cents!”1

Weaver says that the industry doesn’t like the growers to talk to one another, but “they don’t intimidate me.” He has been growing poultry for ten years, beginning with turkey after he retired as a special agent with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement. After three years, he switched to broilers just before Pilgrim’s Pride merged with JBS. He charges that the industry lies to people and will not listen to grievances.

This unfair relationship exists because the food industry has amassed tremendous political and economic power through the massive consolidation that has transpired since antitrust regulation was eviscerated by the Reagan administration. This is especially true in the poultry industry. Over the past twenty-five years, as larger companies acquired smaller, regional processors and cooperatives, the industry has become increasingly concentrated. In the past decade, the five largest poultry producers—Tyson Foods, JBS/Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Sanderson Farms, and Koch Foods—now sell 70 percent of all chicken consumed in the United States.2

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