The bizarre contradiction of low cattle prices and high retail beef prices remains a mystery to everyone, including Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries (ADAI) Commissioner Rick Pate.
Monday, during an appearance on Huntsville radio’s WVNN, Pate reiterated his call for the U.S. Department of Justice to expand its investigation into allegations of domestic meat-packing companies manipulating beef prices.
Last week, Pate issued a statement about a letter he sent to U.S. Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa) and Doug Jones (D-Mountain Brook) requesting they join some of their colleagues in the U.S. Senate seeking the Justice Department inquiry.
“If I could explain — I guess you’re aware, I’ve written Senator Jones and Senator Shelby and asked them if they would try to help us understand what’s going on,” Pate said on “The Jeff Poor Show.” “There have been some questions brought up by Senator [Chuck] Grassley from Iowa and Senator [Mike] Rounds of South Dakota to ask the Department of Justice to really look into it. It’s not intuitive what’s happening. That’s for certain. You expect supply and demand — the demand is there, and so you assume the people supplying it would tend to do better. That certainly hasn’t been the case. I felt the responsibility since this whole coronavirus, as far as the whole food-supply chain, and I felt like we were charged with that by Homeland Security to protect the whole food supply chain.”
“I guess a month, five weeks ago … we had a situation where stockyards were starting to close,” he continued. “It was just so — like I said, so non-intuitive. We had a huge demand. You could hardly find beef at the time in grocery stores. This was before the price went high. This was just that there wasn’t any, hardly. The stockyards were closing because they didn’t have enough buyers there, and the prices for kill cattle were so poor. It was just frustrating, especially in South Alabama. Fortunately, in North Alabama, most of our stockyards stayed open. But there was one week where pretty much I would say about a third of the stockyards in the state were closed from Montgomery south. Some of them were talking about staying closed indefinitely. I just couldn’t have that.”
Pate said after meetings with those stockyards owners, they reopened, and prices rebounded somewhat.
“You can’t rationalize how cattle futures and prices have been as low for the cattlemen, and then now that there is some beef out there, it is priced so much higher,” Pate said. “It’s a situation where you’ve got four or five major corporations that control 80% of the packing meat in this country. Someone bigger than the Alabama Department of Agriculture needs to look into it.”
Pate had said he was more optimistic about determining answers given President Donald Trump’s call for the Justice Department’s investigation.
He also insisted, as he had said a month earlier, that Alabama’s food supply remains plentiful.
“We’ve got to get through this coronavirus, but certainly, I don’t want to do anything else to concern any of our consumers,” Pate added. “We’ve got, gracious, plenty of food in this state and this nation to feed everybody. Nobody is going to go hungry. We might be a little short on beef or pork of some kind, but there’s plenty of protein out there for people to have, and plenty of other food.”
According to Pate, the reports of pouring out milk, plowing into produce and euthanizing poultry were not something that Alabama was subject to at this point.
“We’re proud of what we’ve been able to do,” Pate added.
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.
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