What Do Pork, Quartz and Saline Solution Have in Common?

By ART CULLEN

Hospitals and high-tech manufacturers puckered up when Hurricane Helene blew through North Carolina.

The storm threatened to flood out the quartz supply for semi-conductors and solar, and some health care providers had to ration surgeries over thin supplies of IV solutions.

Chip-makers and solar arrays require high-purity quartz sand for high-heat manufacturing. About 80% of the world supply is mined in Pine Ridge, N.C., a town of 2,300 up in the hills and cut off by the hurricane. Two companies — one owned by Belgians and the other by the French — control the mining.

Sixty percent of the IV fluids market is supplied by a single facility in Marion, N.C., Baxter International, with headquarters in Illinois. Baxter enjoys such dominance because of low prices for IV solutions combined with high entry cost because of sterility requirements. Baxter has been buying up and spinning off companies since the 1930s on its way to this peculiar position.

The quartz miners said they endured only minor damage from the storm and would be back in operation quickly. Likewise Baxter. If the mines shut down for three more weeks, the world economy could spin out of control.

It illustrates how concentrated our basic industries are. Take a look at food and agriculture.

The top four companies control 90% of the cotton seed market, 80% of corn seed, 70% of soybean seed, 67% of pork, and 62% of agrichemicals, according to the advocacy group Farm Action.

“Around three dozen corporations now dictate the lines of development and terms of trade for almost every industry involved in the growing, processing, and distribution of food in America,” Farm Action said in its September report. “Decades of lax antitrust enforcement have culminated in these unprecedented levels of concentration.”

When the Tyson pork plants in Waterloo and Storm Lake shut down briefly at the height of the COVID pandemic, meat prices exploded. The supply chain is so tightly consolidated it almost shattered under the strain. President Donald Trump had to order workers into the plants for fear of hyperinflation.

My basic safety and security is not threatened by Nike dominating the tennis shoe market. Threaten my pork and we have issues to talk about.

Except, we don’t talk about those issues much.

The USDA is not breaking up poultry companies fixing bids and wages among themselves. Mark Cuban, who helped Kamala Harris pile up $1 billion in donations, wouldn’t be hurt if Federal Trade Commission Chair Linda Khan took a hike. She barely made a wave yet. Because she at least talks up anti-trust, donors would rather she move on with Biden.

How it is that only two foreign-owned companies control a resource vital to our national security? Or how it is that companies in Brazil and China control most of our US meat production, and have a chokehold on Iowa? When Chairman Bob Peterson told Iowa leaders to quit speaking harshly about IBP putting the screws to places like Storm Lake, it hurt their feelings. So everyone piped down and backed off.

That’s how you snuff out independent pork production. It is not just that meat production is a “mature” industry — it is as old as the shepherds. The consolidation was forced and by design. The independent sow manager was a low-cost supplier but he was not owned. That had to change.

We also recall the feed companies, Walnut Grove and Moorman’s, and the regional seed suppliers like Mell-O Dent, gobbled up by consolidation and lost to us. Those businesses created wealth, spread out risk and supported a diverse supply of livestock and family farms. The money men cannot stand to see wealth reside and grow for people in Alta when they could take that profit for their own. So they did. Nobody stood in the way. We lost that economy in my adult lifetime.

That’s how you end up with a handful of companies controlling your food and basic security. In quaint days, we regulated industries like power companies that control the basics of life. MidAmerican Energy and Alliant Energy may split Iowa’s power market between themselves but they at least have to ask state regulators if they can take a rate increase.

Consolidation should be an election issue. It’s not. Fortunately, a second hurricane did not hit the IV plant and disable it. It took years for the pork markets to recover from the shock of the pandemic. We’re eating on a prayer as the consolidators do their thing, eliminating family farms and the like while holding your economic security in their hands.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2024

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