More competition could go a long way towards fixing the food system. Progress towards breaking up highly concentrated food and agricultural industries, or even just putting the brakes on further consolidation, may seem daunting. But solutions are available. Perhaps even more importantly, awareness is growing of the obstacles to reform that monopolists and their political allies rely upon. Spoiler alert: monopolists love authoritarian governments.
But is competition really that important to food? There are many reasons to believe it is. More competition could help farmers and ranchers lower input costs and fetch better prices. It could help smaller food companies fighting for supermarket shelf space to compete on quality, rather than just scale. It could help workers struggling for better wages and labor conditions, and school districts trying to fund healthy student meals on a shoe-string budget. And it could help consumers seeking access to “real food” at affordable prices. This is far from an exhaustive list.
Increasingly, the public understands. As consolidation across the food supply chain has reached epic proportions in recent years, awareness of the need to foster more competition has grown. Indeed, popular support for more robust antitrust enforcement may help to explain the 2024 election results. Compare the endorsement of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan by then-Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance, with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ lame non-response to billionaire Democratic donors’ calls for Khan’s ouster.
Of course, the Trump Administration did not hesitate to fire Khan and replace her with a guy that promised to end her “war on mergers.” A December 2025 Executive Order pledged to root out “anti-competitive practices” in “food supply sectors including meat processing, seed, fertilizer, and equipment.” But this seems like more government by press release, with little substance expected to follow the order. After a year of Trump 2.0, corporate food’s stranglehold on the food system seems more secure than ever.
And make no mistake, it’s a stranglehold. The advocacy group Farm Action keeps a running tally of how much the top four firms control in various food industries. So-called “tight oligopolies” dominate from farm to fork, including beef processing (85%), corn seed (80%), retail grocery (69%), pork processing (67%), and agricultural machinery (60.8%). This concentration has culminated over decades, with plenty of blame to go around for the policies that got us here, but that does not mean the situation cannot get worse.
Consolidation among food retailers, for example, nearly took a large step in the wrong direction during the Biden Administration. Had the number two food retailer Kroger merged with the number four food retailer Albertsons, as proposed, it likely would have increased grocery prices for many consumers. Indeed, a recent study from the Atlanta Federal Reserve documents higher food inflation in the years from 2006 to 2020 in areas with fewer food retailers, and provides evidence that the relationship is causal, not just correlational. So, by successfully blocking the Kroger-Albertson’s merger, Khan’s FTC appears to have shielded consumers—at least those in “markets with less retailer competition”—from even higher food prices.
Today’s FTC has retained the merger guidelines that Khan introduced, but in other important respects, it has stepped back. Since FTC commissioner Melissa Holyoak stepped down in November of last year, just two commissioners have led the agency. Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners last Spring, under disputed legal authority. This past summer, the Commission greenlighted a $36 billion merger between food manufacturers Mars, Inc. and Kellanova, which European Union regulators later investigated due to concerns that the combined company’s broad product portfolio would allow it to leverage bargaining power over retailers to raise prices for consumers. The Europeans eventually approved the merger, but the discrepancy in the regulators’ review underscores the FTC’s retreat from Khan’s aggressive approach.
At the Department of Justice, the situation appears bleaker. Abigail Slater, Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, stepped down last month amidst a shake-up that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said “looks like corruption.” In the words of one former anti-trust official aligned with Slater, her departure marked the triumph of “MAGA-In-Name-Only lobbyists” over “genuine MAGA reformers,” a prioritization of “preferential access . . . to the wealthy and well-connected,” over “equal justice under law.” Slater’s resignation came amidst a settlement allowing the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks, the second and third largest providers of wireless networking equipment in the United States. State attorneys general have challenged the settlement as an illegal “sweetheart deal.”
The notion that corruption will suffocate any genuine trustbusting effort within the Administration should hardly come as a surprise. Earlier this week, a Swedish group that has maintained “the world’s largest dataset on democracy for more than a decade” announced that in the past year, Donald Trump has turned the country towards autocracy faster than “the most prominent autocrats of the last 25 years,” including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. A turn towards autocracy means a turn towards corruption. As the early 20th century Peruvian dictator Oscar Benavides famously remarked, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” The Administration’s track record so far gives every indication that this platitude will come to define its governance more, not less, as time goes on, and the favors to the Administration’s “friends” will extend to anti-trust policy.
Fortunately, the FTC, DOJ and other federal executive agencies are not the only policymakers that can foster competition in the food system. The AGs’ lawsuit, in addition to a compelling indictment of the Administration’s corruption, serves as a reminder of the powerful role that state law enforcement officials can play in protecting consumers from monopoly abuses. And of course, there’s Congress.
Senate Democrats made a bold statement earlier this month with the introduction of the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, which would break up big meatpackers like JBS, Smithfield, and Tyson, in part by making them choose a single “line of protein,” i.e. beef, pork or poultry, and to divest the rest of their operations. It would also impose new restrictions on foreign-owned conglomerates like the Brazilian JBS. The meatpackers’ trade group has pilloried the proposal, and the bill has not attracted any Republican co-sponsors, so far. But bipartisan support for efforts to curb meatpacker abuses is not unprecedented, and as the concerns of livestock ranchers and other rural constituents grow, members of Congress may face more pressure to explain why they do not support popular policies like country-of-origin labeling, and legislation like the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act.
Another bold proposal that deserves attention in Congress—call it the “commissary option”—would address consolidation among food retailers. The commissary option would build on the 178 stores run by the Defense Commissary Agency to create a “public option” for grocery. Additional government-run grocery stores, styled on the ones that military families have long adored, could be strategically located in food deserts or areas dominated by a single food retailer, like Walmart. An expanded commissary system could also serve as a “wholesale purchasing co-op” that could negotiate with food producers on behalf of independent grocery stores, which currently pay much higher prices for their goods than behemoths like Walmart.
These policies face an uphill battle, in no small part because dominant food companies invest their monopoly rents to sway attorneys general and other policymakers. To take one example, Walmart and its major owners (the Waltons) spent $32 million in the run-up to the 2024 election. The largest food retailer today, Walmart has driven out the competition in many communities, and left food deserts in place where its stores have closed. Rolling back this power will require persistent, concerted effort in favor of public policy interventions.
Without these interventions, the situation will likely get worse before it gets better. In food retail, for example, traditional grocery stores have steadily lost market share to “big box” outfits like Walmart over the past decade, and during the past year alone, the top three retailers—Walmart, Amazon, and Costco—have accounted for over half of sales growth. The increasing concentration makes consumers vulnerable to price gouging, and also to an erosion in product quality, as seen in recent examples of ultra-processed food creep. The threat to consumers and public health calls for bold action, and elected leaders should not be afraid to take it.