USDA Out With Latest Effort To Promote Competitive Cattle Markets

The USDA announced it’s latest effort to promote “fair and competitive markets for producers” while lowering prices for consumers.  The Department is looking to enhance Price Discovery and Fairness in cattle markets under the Packers and Stockyards Act.  USDA senior adviser Andy Green says with the advanced notice of proposed rule making.

“These are ideas we want to get impact from everyone in the industry and public. And so, it'll be available up on the Federal Register regulations.gov.  You can certainly, find information about it right now at AMS's fair competitive markets, Web page, AMS fair or competitive markets.”

The focus of comments is on potential interventions to develop new benchmarks for what are called alternative marketing agreements, the use of regional cash or spot prices as base prices for fed cattle formula pricing agreements, as well as trading using AMA benchmarks.

“For many years, USDA has fielded complaints from producers around beef Packers using alternative marketing arrangements, and in particular, some of the details around how they do base prices in those AMA's and concerns that those arrangements, particularly the use of regional base prices, has a negative impact on other producers trying to sell their cattle, in the open cash market that is commonly used as those base prices, we put forward a range of options for how to tackle these problems, how to build new base prices that might not have as many adverse consequences.”

Green added it’s important for the Department to ensure producers, large and small, always have a choice, that they're not locked into something they don’t find beneficial.

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