Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to open an antitrust investigation into the meatpacking industry:

The domination of a select few companies in the American meatpacking industry is cause for serious concern. Four companies process 85 percent of all the beef in the United States: Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS S.A., and Smithfield Foods. Just three of these multinational firms — Tyson Foods from the United States, JBS from Brazil, and Smithfield from the People’s Republic of China — control 63 percent of America’s pork processing. […]

This physical plant concentration, in turn, has undermined the stability of America’s meat supply and become an issue of national security. Following a spate of COVID-19 infections among plant workers, in recent days these oligopolistic companies have closed three pork plants indefinitely, resulting in the shutdown of a staggering 15 percent of America’s pork production. As a result, farmers cannot process their livestock — which are costly to maintain — and consumers risk seeing shortages at grocery stores, exacerbating the food insecurity that all too many Americans are currently experiencing. These harms might have been mitigated if the meatpacking industry was less concentrated. The current COVID-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerabilities of American supply chains and the importance of ensuring that, when disaster strikes, America’s food supplies are not in the hands of a few, mostly foreign-based firms.