The cartel that controls the US meat industry

Planned economies are associated with communism, but they're also basically what all corporations do internally, including government owned "corporations" like the police and militaries.

Food gets massive subsidies in the west, because we really don't want shortages, and even massive subsidies are a really cheap way to do that, because most of the consumer cost of food is later in the supply chain than the production.

My gut feeling (I'm neither an economist nor a political student) is that while many small corporations competing with each other is an excellent way to explore the space of supply, demand, and technological changes, when you find a known-good solution it's probably better to merge them into one to get rid of the needless duplication — which happens naturally in capitalism, but then I'd go further and say the government should buy up the shares and take advantage of any dividends to (effectively) be a non-tax based revenue source.

Calling meat agriculture inefficient makes no sense, when meat is a vital, and necessary food. Most of the world grazes meat animals, no crop feeding, and do so on land utterly unusable for crops.

If you want to dive into weirdo anti-meat statements, at least be sensible. We could just eat raw vitamins and eat bacteria paste too, instead of "inefficient" fertilizer driven crops.

But animal ag is far from sustainable, unfortunately.

Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.

Agriculture is a key culprit in most of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture.

Animal ag is directly responsible for majority of deforestation, is a major driver of biodiversity loss, has twice the greenhouse gas emissions than plant based foods, uses much more fresh water, pollutes the waters and causes dead zones in oceans, overfishing threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's, destroys our soils, etc. etc.. The reforestation potential of animal ag lands is so huge, that we could store our entire 1.5C carbon budget in those lands.

We can free up the area a size of Africa (cca 9 Indias) by switching to plant based diets, and use it for reforesting/rewilding.

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares - https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Reforestation potential of pastures (and abolishment of animal ag) would allow us to store the entire 1.5C carbon budget by rewilding/afforesting previously forested pastures. It would also stop biodiversity loss, which is a very serious problem in this day and age. - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture (and reforesting) has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century - https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Beef, soy for animal feed and palm oil are responsible for 60+% of tropical deforestation - https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050 - https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...

Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? - ttps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-change%3A-what-if-the-key-in-Goodland-Anhang/6704c7a0777c82357704d82b9ae8007c1197cb07?p2df

The global production of food is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity, with the use of animals for meat causing twice the pollution of producing plant-based foods - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-gre...

Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216

Mass Extinctions and Their Relationship With Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration: Implications for Earth's Future - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF00...

> The question is why didn't competition undercut them to keep prices low as it had before.

This question is answered by the title of the article.

They've never had so clear an opportunity - what other excuse was available as widespread and impactful as a global pandemic? - and you see it across the board. Daily housekeeping at most hotels is gone forever, "because COVID". They were trying to get away with it pre-pandemic, but people pushed back on the reduced level of service.