President also authorizes Pentagon to use commercial aircraft to import supplies amid growing political pressure
Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act to speed production of infant formula and authorized flights to import supply from overseas, as he faces mounting political pressure over a domestic shortage caused by the safety-related closure of the country’s largest formula manufacturing plant.
The Defense Production Act order requires suppliers of formula manufacturers to fulfill orders from those companies before other customers, in an effort to eliminate production bottlenecks. Biden is also authorizing the defense department to use commercial aircraft to fly formula supplies that meet federal standards from overseas to the US, in what the White House is calling “Operation Fly Formula”.
The number of people suffering from extreme hunger reached an all-time high in 2021 and is on track to increase further this year—unless wealthy countries ramp up efforts to “tackle the root causes of food crises rather than just responding after they occur.
Even before the war in Ukraine, the sanctions on Russia, and the shipping blockade of the Black Sea, farmers across the U.S. were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer, and crop chemicals.
All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short. The war in Ukraine has only amped up the concern among farmers, input suppliers, and those who erroneously proclaim that we, the U.S., must feed the world.
The farm media offers suggestions as to how farmers, despite relatively higher crop prices, might deal with the even steeper increase in input costs. Use less, get your old tillage equipment out or, heaven forbid, consider manually pulling weeds like farmers used to do — of course, years ago, farmers didn’t run thousands of acres.
As war rages in Ukraine and global food worries intensify, investors are thinking more about commodity investments. Chris Rawley from Harvest Returns talks about how even the smaller investor can take part.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Tuesday accused corporate executives of using inflation as a cover to jack up the cost of meat, vegetables and cleaning products and rake in record profits.
“Giant corporations are making record profits by increasing prices, and CEOs are saying the quiet part out loud: they’re happy to help drive inflation,” Warren tweeted on Monday.
“American families pay higher prices and corporate executives get fatter bonuses,” the Democrat added.
Giant corporations are making record profits by increasing prices, and CEOs are saying the quiet part out loud: they’re happy to help drive inflation.
American families pay higher prices and corporate executives get fatter bonuses. See for yourself what executives are saying:
Last year, the consumer price index saw a 7% increase, the largest 12-month gain since 1982. Inflationary pressures have had a particular impact on the prices of meat, poultry, fish and eggs, which increased by 12.5% in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is clearly hitting ordinary consumers hard, and is disproportionately impacting poor and low-income people. But executives of major grocery chains, meat producers and household products manufacturers openly crowing about the phenomenon, largely because it has created higher profit margins.
On an earnings call with analysts Thursday, Rodney McMullen, CEO of the supermarket retail company Kroger, said the company “operates the best when inflation is about 3% to 4%,” adding that “a little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” according to CNN.
The CEO also noted that the increasing cost of goods, fundamentally driven by soaring demand and a supply chain backlog, can be passed off to consumers because they “don’t overly react to that.”
“Businesses like ours have done well when in periods where the inflation was 3% to 4%,” Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran echoed during an investor conference Tuesday.
Last week, the CEO of Tyson, the nation’s second largest processor of chicken, beef and pork products, attributed price increases to rising manufacturing costs and materials shortages, saying in an earnings call: “We’re not asking customers or the consumer ultimately to pay for our inefficiencies. We’re asking them to pay for inflation.”
During the final quarter of 2021, Tyson’s average price of beef rose by roughly 31%. The company’s share price shot up by 11% on Monday after it reported profits that doubled in the first quarter of 2022, according to Reuters.
Consumers also face similar difficulties in the household products market.
Last month, Procter & Gamble — which manufactures or distributes a wide range of cleaning and hygiene items as well as food, snacks and beverages — said on Wednesday that the company expects profits to increase into 2022, even as the cost of labor, freight and raw materials continues to rise, according The Wall Street Journal.
“The consumer is very resilient and very focused on these categories of clean home and health and hygiene,” P&G finance chief Andre Schulten told the Journal.
On CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” P&G CEO Jon Moeller called pricing “a positive contributor to our top line for 17 out of the last 18 years.”
“When you have a business model that’s founded on innovation that provides higher levels of delight, solves problems better upon the consumers, you are able to charge a little bit more,” he added.
Last quarter, P&G outperformed Wall Street’s expectations, leading to a 3.8% jump in share price. The company has also projected a strong financial outlook for 2022.
Lindsay Owens, executive director at Groundwork, a progressive economic think tank, wrote on Twitter last week that “if you want to understand the role of corporate greed in price hikes & inflation in America today, you don’t have to take the word of watchdogs or critics of corporations,”
“CEO’s are admitting it themselves in plain daylight,” she said. “And they’re betting they can get away with it.”
This apparent profiteering is finally receiving scrutiny from the Biden administration. In a blog post from December, the White House said that meat processors’ profits were too high to justify their claim that price increases are the result of supply chain issues, noting that gross profit margins are up 50%.
“If rising input costs were driving rising meat prices, those profit margins would be roughly flat, because higher prices would be offset by the higher costs,” the National Economic Council wrote. “Instead, we’re seeing the dominant meat processors use their market power to extract bigger and bigger profit margins for themselves.”
In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a plan to crack down on “pandemic profiteering” by enforcing antitrust laws, improving transparency in labeling, creating a fund of $1.4 billion to help independent meat processing companies and related businesses get through the pandemic, and continuing a joint investigation with the Justice Department into the chicken processing industry.
Just this month, beef giant JBS was forced to pay $52.5 million to settle a price-fixing lawsuit, according to CBS News. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Dan Gustafson, said the settlement could be an “icebreaker” that might prompt similar cases against other big meat producers, including Tyson, Cargill and National Beef.
UN Report: 34% of agricultural land is degraded, water is overdrawn
In composing a new opening chapter for the 50th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet, I dug into America’s big dietary changes over the last half-century. Of course, I was delighted to take in the heightened attention to the many pluses of shifting from grain-fed, meat-centered diets toward plant-centered eating. I hope the new edition is a joyful (and tempting) celebration of this vital shift.
Yet, I was also appalled by what I learned—that we’ve been moving in two directions, and the overwhelming trend is killing us. Our culture’s shaming around body image personalizes our nation’s nutrition crisis—laying blame on the consumer. It blinds us from seeing, much less challenging, the assault on our health by food corporations that put their profit over our very survival.
Just check out these frightening facts:
First, 60 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from processed food products providing loads of calories—along with huge profits for the few—but virtually no nutrition. Instead, we get much more salt and sugar than is healthy. On average, Americans each consume twice the recommended level of sugar, mostly invisible in processed products. That’s equal to 17 teaspoons of added sugar daily, when not more than six teaspoons for women and nine for men are recommended.
Thus, it should be no surprise that almost 90 percent of Americans fail to meet our government’s nutritional guidelines.
Our food is increasingly implicated in such major killers as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, stroke, and certain cancers.
Our food is increasingly implicated in such major killers as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, stroke, and certain cancers. Here in the US, unhealthy diets are responsible for as much as nearly half of all deaths from heart disease and metabolic disorders. One such disorder is diabetes, which has become our seventh leading cause of death as well as the number one cause of kidney failure, lower-limb amputations, and adult blindness.
Nearly half of American adults now are “pre-diabetic“—meaning we’re on our way—or are suffering from full-blown diabetes. In the US, in just two decades the number of adults with diabetes has more than doubled. Over 90 percent of them suffer from “type 2″ diabetes, in which the body is unable to keep blood sugar at normal levels.
And what’s the medical advice to prevent this disease?
Doctors tell us it is up to us to behave: Lose extra weight, exercise, and eat less fat and sugar, while getting “plenty of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. It’s also a good idea to limit red meat, and avoid processed meats,” says the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
All positive suggestions. But why aren’t our healthcare professionals also forcefully calling out the food industry itself for pushing unhealthy, ultra-processed food products and meat? Why aren’t they—and all of us—uniting around deep economic reform, enabling all of us to afford more healthy, fresh, and whole foods? Such solutions also require policies ensuring that every single neighborhood in America is home to grocery stores offering such foods.
This crisis of food as health hazard extends far beyond the U.S.
I’ll never forget driving through rural India and seeing huge Pepsi logos painted on trees along the road—impossible to miss. As global corporations push such hazardous products, they displace healthy, local fruit drinks that once helped both growers and consumers to thrive.
Worldwide, poor diet is now the greatest contributor to early death—with red meat and sugary beverages among foods implicated in over a fifth of global mortality, reports the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Yet, how many Americans have been warned, for example, that processed meat—sausage, bologna, hot dogs, etc.—was in 2015 deemed a carcinogen by the World Health Organization? A lot of Americans likely assume our Food and Drug Administration would surely be protecting them against a proven, cancer-causing agent.
No. Processed meat still accounts for over a fifth of the meat Americans eat.
And, in addition to far-reaching, needless suffering and early death, we pay financially: Each year, an estimated U.S. $50 billion in health care costs is linked to unhealthy diets, finds a peer-reviewed study.
For every single person you and I elect to represent us in Congress, there are more than 20—mainly corporate—lobbyists working for the interests of their bosses.
I am blown away.
Why, to pick just one example, aren’t we told that hot dogs can cause cancer?
Afterall, once tobacco was proven carcinogenic, our public agencies—finally—stepped in to limit its advertising and sales. True, we’ve not yet gone far enough on tobacco; but we have been able to cut the rate of smoking by almost half in the last half-century.
So, why not a comparable national campaign for making healthy eating available to all?
The answer, as noted, is the insidious power that our highly concentrated food industry exerts over lawmakers and those in our public agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration.
For every single person you and I elect to represent us in Congress, there are more than 20—mainly corporate—lobbyists working for the interests of their bosses. Among them, agribusiness lobbyists outnumber even those pushing oil and gas interests.
Saving Our Endangered Democracy: Truth Be Told @fmlappe
Moreover, government officials and elected representatives often move from posts in government to work instead for the private interests of agribusinesses and other firms. During the Obama presidency, to pick just one example, Michael Taylor circledthree times from the Monsanto corporation, pushing genetically engineered seeds linked to a dangerous herbicide, to government departments including the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture and then, back again, to industry.
Corporate influence in public agencies enables it to overpower the public good in an even more insidious way—using our own biology against us, reveals a breakthrough new book by Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Moss—Hooked: Food, Free Will and How Food Giants Exploit Our Additions.
The industry has learned that some foods—especially sugars—can be even more addictive than drugs, tobacco, or alcohol, Moss finds. “Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets,” he says, “so food manufacturers have deployed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying.”
The question is now clear. With our lives and those of our loved ones at stake, how can we tap our appropriate outrage to clean up Washington so we can clean up our diets?
Choosing healthy food, if we can, has become a rebel act for life itself, and in a way I didn’t foresee 50 years ago when writing Diet for a Small Planet. On the case is, among many others, is RealFoodMedia.org founded and co-directed by my daughter Anna Lappé.
Fortunately, an historic movement is emerging to remove the power of private interests now corrupting our democracy and therefore our food system. It is a “movement of moments” for democracy reforms that puts the public interest first.
Our organization, the Small Planet Institute, and a huge network of organizations—Democracy Initiative—have teamed up to make it easier for all of us to act. Check out our action hub—DemocracyMovement.US—to discover rewarding ways you and your friends can jump in now.
We humans imagine ourselves to be the brightest species; but we are undoubtedly the first in which segments of our kind are turning their species’ food supply into a major killer.
Hmmm. Not so bright. Let’s call it out. Let’s turn it around, now.
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