At recent earnings calls, shareholders of some publicly traded meat companies asked whether things like the Trump administration’s deportation plans would pose challenges to their industries. “We’ve been there before. It didn’t affect our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, owned by Brazilian food company Malfrig. answered the question. In response to a similar question on Tyson Foods’ earnings call, CEO Donnie King said: It doesn’t matter which party is in control. ”
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration will target meat processing facilities run by the industry’s biggest companies, given the preferential treatment they received during the first Trump administration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order allowing meat processing plants to continue operating, even though they were among the hardest hit by the disease. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later revealed that Tyson’s legal department drafted the order.
“These large meat processing companies protect themselves from scrutiny, force workers into dangerous conditions, and sometimes work in concert with political officials in the Trump administration to protect them from harm. “preventing the introduction of additional safeguards to protect workers” and “responsible for the resulting worker illnesses and deaths,” the commission concluded in a report published in December 2022.
Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, said labor is tight in meat processing plants and in the agriculture industry as a whole. Escalante said the industry needs more workers and argued that the U.S. should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa program to include more livestock workers. There is. Escalante said smaller farms are likely to be affected by the labor shortage, while larger farms may turn to mechanization.
Deporting meat packing workers en masse could lead to higher prices for consumers. A Texas A&M AgriLife Research report estimates that removing immigrant workers from U.S. dairy farms would nearly double the retail price of milk. There are many unknowns about Trump’s deportation plan, so it’s unclear how it will affect meat and food prices more generally. “We don’t know yet how this will play out,” Hubbard said.
(Tag Translation)Science
