2023 Year End Round Up

Thank you for another year of following Food & Power! Before we take a brief holiday break, we wanted to recap some of our biggest stories of 2023 and look ahead to antimonopoly action expected in 2024.

The Kroger-Albertsons Mega-Merger: In October 2022, Kroger announced its plans to buy rival Albertsons. In the year since, Claire Kelloway covered what this deal will mean for shoppers, workers, and farmers in Food & Power, The American Prospect, and ProMarket. In short: it doesn’t look good.

Senator Elizabeth Warren recently cited Food & Power in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block the deal and reject Kroger and Albertsons’s proposed divestiture plan to C&S Wholesale Grocers. The merging parties expect the FTC to complete its investigation early in the new year – and you can expect a breakdown of this decision in F&P!

“Climate-Smart” or Corporate Greenwashing?: The Biden administration has invested big in so-called climate-smart commodities, or foods from farms that reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. But not all “climate-smart” efforts are made equal, and this year Food & Power wrote about Big Ag’s efforts to greenwash its carbon footprint with the help of public funds.

Farm Bill: The Farm Bill, which determines the future of all federal farm and nutrition programs, technically expired in September. Leadership battles and shutdown stalemates in Congress pushed Farm Bill work into 2024. In February, Food & Power summarized some of the key antimonopoly issues on the table in the next Farm Bill. Stay tuned for more coverage when debates (hopefully) ramp up next year.

Agency Antitrust Action: Federal antitrust enforcers at the FTC, Justice Department (DOJ), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed major reforms this year. The FTC started 2023 by introducing a rule to ban noncompete agreements for workers and introduced new guidelines for assessing corporate mergers with the DOJ in July. Attorneys at the DOJ sued a data company, AgriStats, for allegedly supporting meat price-fixing schemes and acted on a tip from USDA to challenge Koch Foods for their steep poultry contract termination penalties. USDA also finalized a rule to increase transparency in poultry contracts.

Food & Power broke down the details of these policies and how they may, or may not, impact farmers and food markets. In 2024, we’ll be waiting for the USDA to introduce more rules governing livestock markets and for the FTC and DOJ to finalize their merger guidelines and noncompete ban or take on grocery buyer power under the Robinson-Patman Act.

Right to Repair: Several states introduced or passed laws this year that require farm equipment makers to share or sell all the tools, manuals, and software that farmers need to fix their tractors. Food & Power examined the first such law passed in Colorado. Farmers and consumer groups also took legal action against monopolized repair markets: a judge recently allowed a private class action antitrust suit against John Deere to go forward, and repair groups filed a petition urging the FTC to protect the right to repair through rulemaking. 2024 should be another big year for farmers fighting to fix their things.