New Rethink Trade report finds extreme corporate concentration in meatpacking is driving the beef price crisis, with costs rising even more after Trump cut tariffs and authorized record imports to help foreign allies.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Unwilling to take on the big meatpacking monopolies, President Trump has incorrectly blamed ranchers, the weather, and even his own trade policies for our nation’s record high beef prices. Yet despite cutting beef tariffs and authorizing record-high beef imports, the administration has failed to bring down beef prices for American consumers while accelerating the collapse of the American ranchers Trump claims to support, according to a new report released today by the American Economic Liberties Project’s Rethink Trade program.
The report finds the real driver of the price crisis is corporate concentration in the meatpacking and feedlot industries and decades of anti-producer trade policy, which have compounded the squeeze and driven independent ranchers and feedlots into bankruptcy. Trump’s response to the beef price crisis — cutting tariffs and expanding imports — addresses neither problem.
“Despite calling himself the ‘tariff man,’ Donald Trump has had an oddly free trade response to the beef price crisis, all to no avail given beef prices are high because four corporations control 85% of meatpacking, not because of tariffs or a lack of import volumes,” said Katie Hettinga, Rethink Trade Policy Analyst and the report’s lead author. “Unless Trump breaks the power of dominant meat packers and grocery chains to keep prices high, American consumers will suffer.”
“President Trump cannot bring down meat prices if he is unwilling to take on Big Meatpacking,” said Lori Wallach, Director of the Rethink Trade program at American Economic Liberties Project. “Responding to a corporate-monopoly-driven price crisis with trade tools has caused a double whammy: no relief for American consumers, and record floods of imported beef threatening the livelihoods of the ranchers who supported Trump.”
“Even with record imports, 80% of beef eaten in America is raised in America. To bring prices down, the administration must break up the Big Four beef packers that dictate terms to consumers and ranchers alike, and fix the 1990s “free trade” policies that have hollowed out the U.S. cattle herd,” Wallach continued.
The report documents how Trump’s tariff cuts and import expansions over the last months have repeatedly failed to bring prices down as they are the wrong policy interventions:
- Tariff increases and dropping imports didn’t raise prices. When Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect in 2025, imports fell 9.9% but ground beef prices rose just 0.67%.
- Tariff cuts and surging imports didn’t lower prices. When Trump exempted most beef from tariffs in November 2025, prices rose another 1.94% even as imports grew 10.4%.
- Expanded Argentine imports didn’t lower prices. When Trump tried to help his friend right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei before that nation’s elections and increased the low-tariff Argentine import volume in February 2026, U.S. beef retail prices remained flat.
The real driver, the report shows, is structural:
- Four companies process 85% of U.S. beef. Twenty firms process 98% of cattle slaughtered nationwide. Three of the Big Four have paid tens of millions in settlements for alleged price-fixing, but none have been broken up.
- Independent feedlots are being squeezed out. The vast majority of feedlots —92% — have a capacity of less than 1,000 head, but account for only 12.9% of U.S. cattle sales for slaughter. From 1990 to 2021, average net income for independent feedlots dropped from $50 profit per head to $50 loss. More than 50,000 small feedlots have shut down since 2011.
- The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest since 1951. Despite growing demand and higher cattle prices, the United States has the lowest herd size in 75 years. Despite drought conditions easing in 2022, which should have incentivized ranchers to invest in herd growth, herd size has dropped since 2020.
- Ranchers, stockers and feedlots – the producer side of the supply chain – earn 16% less of the retail beef dollar than before consolidation. The producer share dropped from 70% in the 1970s to a low of 37% in 2021.
- More than 100,000 cattle operations have closed since 2017. Farm bankruptcies in April 2026 hit their highest level since the pandemic.
The report also documents how beef imports rose significantly after 1990s trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO dismantled the supply management tools that previously protected U.S. ranchers from import floods. And then in 2016, Congress repealed mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef after the WTO ruling it was an illegal trade barrier, which spurred even higher import levels. All told, the share of U.S. beef consumption satisfied by imports has more than doubled.
Rethink Trade’s recommendations:
- Break up the Big Four meatpackers through stronger antitrust enforcement including the Packers and Stockyards Act, and enact the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act.
- Reduce beef import quotas and raise in-quota and over-quota tariff rates to signal ranchers to expand the cattle herd.
- Reinstate mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling through the bipartisan American Beef Labeling Act to provide U.S. consumers the information needed to support domestic cattle farmers and ranchers.
- Prosecute fraudulent U.S.-origin claims so that large packers cannot profit from falsely branding imported beef or beef from imported cattle as American.
Read the full report here.
Rethink Trade is a program of the American Economic Liberties Project.
Learn more about Economic Liberties and Rethink Trade.