The real monopoly up close
I am reflecting on the diversity I’ve experienced in my last two weeks while in the United Kingdom for five days, in Pennsylvania with a great group of farmers and then off to Connecticut with folks from the fashion design world.
As diverse as that all sounds, it turns out that the primary discussion was exactly the same in each location: How do we deal with monopolistic activities in the retail world? Every time I turn around, someone is proposing a new rule or law and guess who it ends up hurting? The small business owner, of course. So what is the real answer? I am not sure but I think we should explore the real problem in greater depth.
The first leg of my journey did get me on a dozen farms in England. I listened to every farmer talk about the retail pressure to implement this production method or that production method and yet they get paid less than ever to do it. The UK is a country of 65 million citizens and they only produce 60% of the food they consume. The exodus of farmers in the last 10 years would be no different, or perhaps at an even more alarming rate, than we have had here on United States soil.
The concept of being asked to do more and get paid less really stems from the retailer trying to design marketing programs to keep the UK consumers hooked on “the quality of their aligned producers” when in reality it is a group of cubicle dwellers designing marketing programs without the farmers in mind. The real question for UK farmers is how do they get more of the consumer’s food dollar?
In Pennsylvania I was able to get out and see a couple farms and hear the trouble with profitability for both dairy and poultry. I visited with farmers who are selling direct and have quite the business on the East Coast. Believe it or not, the challenge echoed by each of them was about how to compete with the larger retail entities. These folks own the farm and do a farm-to-fork program selling to end-users and still have trouble competing at the retail level. The No. 1 complaint I heard is that they are continually asked to implement production techniques that “meet consumer demands” yet they are asked to take less money for their products. It appears, again, that the real question for the U.S. farmer is how can we get more of the consumer’s food dollar?
Off to Fairfield, Connecticut, where I was in the most interesting meeting I have been in for quite some time. There was no “preaching to the choir” here. I was asked to sit on a panel to discuss the future of renewable fibers. The meeting was part of a global discussion taking place that was organized by the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion. The bottom line is that a group of folks within the fashion world have discovered the benefit of grazing animals to soil and planet health and want to put products like wool back front and center in the fashion industry.
Obviously this idea is right up my alley but, as you would expect, there were several things discussed about farming that I did not appreciate. Nonetheless, that is how dialogue begins and it was a tremendous beginning. It was interesting to note that, at the end of the day, the challenge in fashion was “how do we compete with the retail monopoly that markets price over quality?”
This is where our two worlds collide big time. I know many of my friends in beef production believe that if we just had an mCOOL labeling rule, all of our problems would disappear but I disagree for this reason: Clothing has been labeled for a long time and currently only 2 to 3% of the clothes purchased in the U.S. are actually made in the U.S. As an interesting side note, I had on the most U.S. made clothing of anybody on that panel and they were all talking about rebuilding the U.S. textile infrastructure! That’s the issue: who is willing to put their money where their mouth is?
When giant retail monopolies control the prices producers get and consumers pay, there is only one entity that is making a profit—the monopoly. The obvious, but not always easy to implement, solution seems to be continuing to move our spending dollars toward local production and manufacturing. Stop shopping someplace just because it is a little bit cheaper because you are putting U.S. producers out of business by purchasing cheap foreign imports.
Go straight to the source. There are local meat, milk, eggs and produce available in abundance but you may have to look for it and you may have to pay a little more to keep a family farm afloat but doesn’t that give our country sustainability when we encourage and support our own food production? Do we want to be the UK and import much of our food where we have little to no control over the quality? If all the farmers go out of business, supermarkets cannot grow the food and where will we be when we can’t feed our own people?
I wish I had the answer but clearly I have only identified the problem as being bigger and more far reaching than I could have ever imagined. I can tell you I also stopped in at least one butcher shop on each of my visits and I saw milk, meat and eggs selling for a significant premium. The problem being that this only represents about 5% of the U.S. buying preferences. At the end of the day, we have too much retail control in too few hands and I sincerely hope that we can shift the daily discussion to how we can fix that for the benefit of everyone from producers to fashion experts and all those who works hard to make a living and proudly produce a product consumers should be willing to pay a fair price for.
Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].
