Jan 30, 2025
On January 27, The Capitol Forum held a conference call with former U.S. Department of Agriculture Senior Advisor for Fair and Competitive Markets Andy Green to discuss the what the Biden USDA accomplished on improving the fairness and competitiveness of food markets, and what they would like to see from the agency in the future. The full transcript, which has been modified slightly for accuracy, can be found below.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our conference call today with my good friend, Andy Green. I’m Teddy Downey, Executive Editor here at The Capitol Forum. And Andy Green is the former U.S. Department of Agriculture Senior Advisor for Fair and Competitive Markets. And today we’re going to talk about what he worked on at the USDA, what he accomplished, what the team there accomplished, and what they’d also like to see from the agency in the future. And Andy, thank you so much for doing this today.
ANDY GREEN: My pleasure, Teddy. Thanks for having me.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And a quick note, if you have questions, please type them into the questions pane in the control panel. Or you can email us at editorial@thecapitolforum.com. That’s editorial@thecapitolforum.com.
And so, Andy, let’s start off, if you wouldn’t mind kind of just walking us through some of the highlights of what you accomplished, what the team accomplished, at USDA. And also, give us like a scope of like how you viewed the problem going in, both from a standpoint of competition in these markets, but also from the sort of logistical challenge of steering USDA in ostensibly a really different direction, a new direction.
ANDY GREEN: Yeah, great, great questions, Teddy. And let me jump in, but there’s so much in there. So, of course, redirect and whatnot, as we go. Let me start in the order you asked. So, what we accomplished—and let me talk about the accomplishments. Let me talk about sort of how we started and sort of how we tried to move the ball.
So, accomplishments sitting here now in January 2025, looking back at what we did in four years, we finalized three new Packers and Stockers rules that are big, bold, and robust in scope. One was to provide a whole new transparency regime modeled in part on the FTC’s franchise regime, but also looking at things like the SEC’s disclosure. We had a CEO attestation modeled on the Volcker rule and the Sarbanes-Oxley and other things that really, all these things provide dramatic new transparency for chicken growers.
A second big rule was to prohibit retaliation, which had been a major problem across livestock and poultry. Also, to set a standard around non-discrimination anti-discrimination, as well as enhance enforcement of deceptive practices.
And a third rule, which we finalized, with what felt like a mic drop, on my last day literally in the office. I handed in my computer, walked out the door, and we had just finalized a third final rule which prohibited really unfair variability and unfair payment terms. Again, in poultry contracting, a major problem that we had worked with DOJ on in a major enforcement action against the third largest poultry company out there, also significantly enhanced the transparency around an additional capital investment regime. Again, it gets complicated. But poultry growers—you go into this business—poultry growers can be asked to put more of their money on the line, taking out debt, whatever, if the companies ask them to. And they really had very limited visibility into why, what, how, et cetera. And that stymied enforcement of a set of rules that had been put in place going all the way back to 2012 during the first Vilsack term under Obama. So, significantly enhanced all of those things that really do benefit. Two out of three were focused on the poultry industry. One of them covered everything.
A couple of other big items of progress. Again, I’m happy to get into detail on each one of these things. We created a whole new partnership with the state attorneys general, $15 million. Not a big amount of money, but non-trivial for actual state enforcement. So that the federal government can help partner with state attorneys general to do competition and consumer protection enforcement in food and agriculture. Thirty bipartisan attorneys general, really, really exciting area.
We also had a whole new initiative to improve the transparency, the fairness, the competition, the patent quality, in seeds, which is, again, a really, that [inaudible]. You think about prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals, similar set of issues were in seed-tion.
And then, again, two more things that I would highlight. One is we improve the labeling that consumers get. And when they go to the grocery store to buy meat, poultry, et cetera, we enhance the product USA label so that it, again, aligns with the FTC’s approach of made in the USA is 100 percent made in the USA.
We also improve the standards around antibiotic free and sustainably raised or whatnot. So, if you claim you don’t have antibiotics, you better be prepared to test and show that you’re not. Again, that flows through to the benefits to farmers and ranchers that are doing the right thing, processors that are doing the right thing too.
Last thing I’d point out, and this is a big one. We put a lot of money directly into competition for farmers and ranchers, more than a billion dollars into meat and poultry processing, $900 million in a new domestic, sustainable fertilizer choice. And then a whole bunch of other additional supports, $100 million to support transition to organic. Other direct investments that help transform the food system in response to the pandemic. So, looking back, it’s a robust set of accomplishments in a short period of time. You want me to go back?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Let’s stay on this and then we’ll get back to like just the challenge of what it was to sort of push USDA in this direction. What has been the feedback from the constituents, from the stakeholders, in industry? Just would love to get how this played out politically from a constituency standpoint.
ANDY GREEN: You know, these have been issues that have been developing and festering for a long time. And look, I’m not a farm kid. I’m from San Francisco, California.
I had been in financial regulation for nearly 15 years, working on Dodd-Frank and the Volcker rule and other things like that. And I think I was brought in—nobody’s ever said this directly to me, but I feel fairly confident I was brought in to bring an outsider’s perspective and kind of maybe ask dumb questions and maybe think about doing things differently and try to land a few things that would move the ball forward in some of these intractable areas.
So, the feedback, I think was—and this kind of goes to your original question about what was it like facing this challenge going in? There was a sense of tremendous frustration by advocacy groups and farmers amd ranchers that they had been fighting this fight for a long time and making only the most limited progress. And that these were big problems and that they were brought to the fore by the pandemic and the supply chain collapses that cratered cattle prices and left lots of poultry farmers without flocks and things like that, as well as consumers without meat on their grocery shelves during the COVID pandemic. Like frustration given these array of court cases that folks had interpreted to throw up massive roadblocks to doing anything in packers and stockyards.
And also, just a frustration that USDA had not been able to finalize things or a lot of things. And that Trump had taken gypsum and put it in a corner of AMS and whatnot, just a lot of frustration.
And then there was, I think, there was a fair amount—I heard a fair amount of fear among some of the large processing companies of what are we going to do? Are we going to crush their business and this and that?
And I think what we had to do was dig our way out of the hole bit by bit and build trust, build trust both among the farmer, the folks that were on the short end of the stick for a long time, but also build trust that we can do rules that are sensible and make sense and can be complied with. I think there was some frustration in the first go around that there had been a very large reform effort in 2010 that tried to do everything at once, that wasn’t digestible. It wasn’t digestible for the folks that were in favor of it and it wasn’t digestible by industry that was opposed to it.
And so, we took a strategy of doing, you can call it bite-sized pieces or kind of I like to talk about it as a layered approach, bit by bit of moving the ball and making tangible progress to chip away at some of these obstacles, build trust and show that we could make a difference.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And really is the vision that you add some meat behind Packers and Stockyards and some meat behind the authority and some transparency so that USDA could be more proactive from an enforcement standpoint? Was that the vision? And how is that frustrated ultimately by Trump winning or not having another four years to continue to implement change?
ANDY GREEN: Yeah, absolutely. This approach of layering transparency and strong enforcement on top of each other was a very intentional effort to use both tools to reinforce each other. You know, if we can make progress giving farmers and ranchers more information and remove some of the deception out there, you’ve made progress.
I also think that from—this is a little bit of my experience having been at the SEC, where you can go a long way in moving markets just by shining a spotlight on it. This was one of Brandeis’s major insights. You know, the street light is maybe the best police person. Or the sunlight is the best disinfectant in some cases.
So, to the extent that that works, that’s awesome. To the extent that folks are still suffering from problems, you’ve suddenly also empowered them with new data and information that they can bring and try to figure out what’s going on. Why am I not getting a fair return? Why am I getting multiple flocks in a row that are not working out for me? Or why am I getting these prices that don’t work, et cetera.?
And so, the transparency then becomes a foundation for going after other things that are actual prohibitions and enforcement. Such as, hey, you’ve retaliated against me for exercising my legal rights. Or you’ve retaliated against me for trying to seek a new competitive business opportunity to somebody else. Or you’ve retaliated against me because of race, sex, you name it, whatever it might be. Those work hand in glove.
Similarly, hey, why are you asking me to make this additional capital investment? Well, if you’ve laid out the real reasons, I can understand them. To the extent that those reasons don’t make sense, I can either argue with you or, at some point, it becomes an unfairness problem, an unavoidable harm that is not outweighed by some benefit. And you can go to USDA or bring enforcement action.
So, it works together and it begins to chip away at some of the court cases where they were throwing up some of these harm to competition obstacles. And taking a careful layered approach allows the court to really consider specific facts and start to, again, create this space to do stuff in this area that previously hadn’t been done, felt like you couldn’t do anything. Well, now we’ve moved the ball and gotten a lot more than we had before.
You asked a good question. So I can keep going on. What have we not been able to accomplish? What’s going to be stymied because of four years of Trump? I guess the biggest thing that I feel like is hanging out there is the cattle markets work that we have made some progress on, but I think a lot more needs to be done.
I’ll add one more thought in a second on another big area because we withdrew a proposed rule that a lot of folks are very interested in.
So, in cattle markets, we put out this fall an advance notice of proposed rulemaking around price discovery in cattle that laid out a number of options. It’s sort of a request for comments about some regulatory rulemaking options. That closed in January. The comments are up for folks to be able to review.
I don’t know whether the Trump administration will do anything with that. I don’t have a lot of optimism in that front based on just kind of conversations with the established players in industry. But maybe I’m open to being surprised. And if they do some good stuff, then happy to congratulate them on it.
I do think that cattle markets price transparency, price discovery proposal brought to the forefront a number of problems that I think need to be addressed, whoever is in charge. The most egregious one, in my view, remains this basically benchmarking where cattle—like the largest set of transactions, contracts in cattle, price off of these fairly thin market news reports in regions. And it’s just priced off of whatever was traded last week in the live cattle market.
Well, if you bought an ETF from, I don’t know, Goldman Sachs or BlackRock or whoever, had a big footprint in the market, and the value of your ETF was based on whatever they happened to trade last week on one of their regional—imagine like there was a regional Boston stock exchange or something. Do you think it would affect how they trade? Do you think it would affect whether you’re going to get access to the like magnificent six or seven or you’re going to get stuck with a Russell 2000?
I think those types of incentives are out there, and they need to be thought about carefully. You don’t have to go all the way to blow it up to make some real progress in improving things. Maybe it should be blown up at some point, but let’s start with making some progress. That to me is the biggest area that I am not optimistic there will be progress that really there ought to be.
You know, the other area that I don’t know whether there will be progress on is enforcement. You know, we laid out a number of these rules. They need to be enforced. If there is meaningful enforcement—and look, I think there’s some really great folks that have been nominated for DOJ antitrust. We don’t have a lot of details about USDA nom yet. And I don’t know whether they will replace me. But it just remains to be seen whether there will be a forward-leaning enforcement. And I think that’s going to be really important in terms of continuing to show that the Packers and Stockers Act and all the protections that have been put in place will really deliver the meaningful progress that the farmers and ranchers, many of whom probably voted for Trump, kind of expect and want and deserve.
TEDDY DOWNEY: One of the things that happened at the antitrust agencies was there were kind of different theories of change for different markets. You know, in the supermarket world and the independent grocer world, they’re really leaning on the RPA as a way to sort of rebalance the playing field to deal with Amazon and Walmart and what have you, Total Wine and things like that. And then you had another theory of we’re going to bring these big Section 2 cases and we’re going to put structural reform and breakups on the table. You know, you sort of had some dabbling in Section 2 in ag, but no really—I guess you had some cases. You had the FTC, was that a fertilizer case? What was it? Yeah, Syngenta Corteva, pesticides, sorry, pesticides. And then you had the settlement at the DOJ on chicken.
So, there’s some of that, but in your view, if this is really going to change, if those constituencies are going to be like, I am no longer under the thumb of the big processors or what have you, or just the dominant firms in these markets, do you think Section 2 cases, big transformative Section 2 cases, need to be on the table? Or do you think Packers and Stockyards, if you had enough activity at the AG and at USDA that you could actually meaningfully rebalance that power dynamic?
Because it I read this Basil Misharbish’s paper and there were a lot of very consolidated markets, right? In ag. And it seems like a long, long fight to tip the scales potentially. I wanted to get your thoughts on that, kind of your reaction on what you see as a long-term solution and even how much is there still to go?
ANDY GREEN: Yeah. One thing that I think is worth noting is how different, how there really are different sectors with different, frankly, different authorities available to the federal government. And how I think you kind of have to look sector-by-sector in terms of what you can do and what should be done.
You know, if Congress gets involved it’s a different set of options because you can really open things up. But assuming that Congress does not legislate aggressively across the board in this space and just with the authorities that currently exist, let’s take three or four examples.
So, Packers and Stockyards covers livestock, poultry, and meat. So, that’s one set of areas where I really talked about a lot of the livestock and poultry. We were also resurrecting the Robinson-Patman Act like authorities under the Packers and Stockyards Act that do exist. They just haven’t been used for 30 years or more.
And so, we actually did a report based on a 6(b) investigation—we have 6(b) authorities because we’re kind of an inheritor of the FTC Act set of authorities—which looked at, hey, what are some of the unfair practices? What are some of the discriminatory practices? What are some of the anti-competitive practices going on in meat sales right now? How does that flow back into the ability for farmers or ranchers to access retail markets? How does that flow into the ability for—or higher prices, junk fees, hidden fees that consumers are paying? We found them, frankly. They’re in that report. You can see it from October 2024.
So, again, this might be one of those if we had another four years, what would we be working on? Continuing that work, will Trump and team do any of that? I don’t know. I’ll leave it to history for them to determine whether they pick it up and continue it or not. But it doesn’t strike me as in anybody’s interest to let there be junk fees that packers have to pay and demanded by retailers and distributors or retailers and distributors that don’t let local schools or local restaurants access local and regional meat. That seems like not in anybody’s interest.
So, that’s the set of authorities that we would like to utilize. I happen to think that the rulemaking that we did under Packers and Stockyards is kind of functionally equivalent to a big enforcement case under Section 2 that you might see against the tech companies or against real estate or whatever.
I think there’s some advantages to doing it under Packers and Stockyards. Because in a rulemaking context, we’ve been doing rulemaking for a very long time. It’s not new. It’s not novel. It’s not debatable. And we can bring the expertise that USDA has in those markets to figure out what remedies work best to address some of the problems.
And then maybe you don’t need to do that kind of big Section 2 case. Or if you do, it can be kind of thoughtful, the way the Wayne Sanderson case that DOJ brought kind of lined up ultimately with some of the reforms that we did in our rulemaking.
Let’s take seeds. Seeds, we don’t have Packers and Stockyards Act style unfair, unjust, discriminatory, deceptive practices authority at USDA. There’s the Federal Seed Act that prohibits false advertising, which is much narrower than deceptive practices. FTC would have the usual unfair methods of competition, Section 5, et cetera, types of authorities they could bring. And then you’ve got DOJ that traditionally oversees the seed sector as a kind of the way they divided up with the FTC from an antitrust perspective.
And then you’ve got the PTO that issues patents. And if you’re one of the big seed companies and you want to get a patent, you’re pounding on the door of PTO all the time. This is one of the things that we tried to fix. Like who’s knocking on the door of PTO to say, hey, wait a second. Have you double checked? Have you thought about this? Have you maybe said this is an overbroad patent or inappropriate or whatnot? And then who’s connecting the dots of how those patents are getting used to stop or frustrate competition?
That set of authorities sort of doesn’t, not that it doesn’t exist, but you have to pull it together from all these three, four agencies. Could there be even new, more creative, authorities brought to the table? Absolutely. But, for example, there’s no Hatch-Waxman in seeds like there is in prescription drugs. I don’t think Hatch-Waxman is perfect, but the FTC was able to do some stuff under what’s it? The Orange Book or whatnot. Could you do similar things? Maybe.
So, that’s its own set of authorities. Then you want to go into other things. You want to talk about milk. USA has milk marketing orders. We finalized a new milk marketing order. You can go sector-by-sector and each one of these things has its own distinct little areas. So, it’s one of those things where I guess you (a) you’ve got to think about your resources and they had to make choices with limited resources.
Jonathan Kanter used to—I heard him speak at CAP or someplace where he talked about there’s 270 attorneys or whatever the number was and how that’s tiny compared to what it was 30 years ago. I’m thinking, do I have seven attorneys that I can bring to bear at USDA? You know, sometimes it’s like there’s limited authorities.
But putting that all aside, there is an opportunity to have big bold cases that can ripple through these other sectors and start to change behavior, even if you don’t bring a case in every single one of these sectors. So, both of those things I think are true.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And let’s talk about a couple of things. One, I think there’s just a big intellectual shift here, right? Which is that, hey, these are useful tools. You know, Packers and Stockyards, Robinson-Patman Act. I noticed that even the Republicans who really don’t want to enforce Robinson-Patman, they’ll at least say this law ought to be enforced, right? Which is like just a huge, huge change.
I think I’ve talked to people at USDA in the past who said, we don’t really do Packers and Stockyards. That’s just not something we do. Are you seeing a bipartisan shift at all when it comes to ag on these are laws that need to be enforced as opposed to just like something that just shouldn’t happen more generally?
And I’m wondering if you think that intellectually this will at some point play out at some level in the farm bill, with the farm bill becoming less of a boondoggle and more of an intellectually sort of compelling argument with new policies. Because, I mean, that has happened at some level at the FTC and DOJ. It’s just like, no one’s talking about going back to the consumer welfare standard really. It’s like we’ve kind of gotten past that. And I’m wondering if you feel that has happened when it comes to ag and competition in ag.
ANDY GREEN: Yeah, I think the answer is yes. I think we are a little bit behind the antitrust agencies. But similar transformation, I think, has occurred in a way that we’re not going back. Whether it sticks, I think, will be a political choice by the leadership of USDA and to some extent DOJ because that partnership is extremely important.
I think the leadership will matter a lot. If leadership decides we’re going to kill all enforcement or most enforcement, you can really smother things for a while and create a fear of doing anything in kind of ordinary working career staff that will have very negative effects for a long time to come. Even if you get somebody like me or whoever the next person is, hopefully somebody way better, back in there to try to do some reforms, that person will then face career resistance, not because of an intellectual view, but out of fear of, well, if we do anything, we’re going to get squashed. So, you’ve got that dynamic. These next four years are extremely important for being able to continue and grow this work.
But you could do it sensibly. You could do it step-by-step and sensibly, to the extent that there are folks that are nervous about it. As long as it doesn’t go to zero or backwards, I think that intellectual shift that you’ve talked about is real. It’s going to stay, and you can’t undo it. Maybe an in there, and from Vilsack on down, probably from Biden on down, talking about these issues for four years, you’ve got folks in these agencies looking at problems and thinking about them differently than they’d ever thought about them before. That’s real. It will stay. And again, I hope it’s nurtured rather than smothered. I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be nurtured, but I might be overly optimistic. We’ll see.
In terms of the Farm Bill, the Farm Bill is a funny thing. There have been efforts for years to try to get some of this competition stuff into the Farm Bill. It’s never quite made it in there. I am not, by any shape, a Farm Bill expert. There are things in the ag world that move outside of the Farm Bill, or traditionally move outside of the Farm Bill.
The best example being livestock mandatory reporting, which comes up for renewal and reauthorization from time-to-time. That reporting regime is sort of a little mini-SEC transparency regime for cattle. Traditionally not part of the Farm Bill, but has been a vehicle for debating the Grassley, Fischer tester mandatory minimums and cattle market competition and other things.
Again, without having any particular specifics in mind, maybe it’s outside the Farm Bill that some of these competition needs move. Or maybe it’s going to be a little bit here, a little bit there. Where you had in the Stabenow marker, the AMS seed liaison and some of the seed competition work be able to come to the forefront. Maybe there’s some things there that can move. Traditionally, research funds are done in the appropriations world, not in the Farm Bill. And the research funds and research really closely connected to seed choices and seed opportunities.
So, I don’t know, the Farm Bill trade-offs are complicated. You get into the big politics of financial security for farmers. Like just the federal subsidies versus the financial security for working families with nutrition, and that battle becomes the dominant battle in the Farm Bill. I kind of would look towards what are the other vehicles that can move? But maybe it’s a little bit of all the above. I don’t know.
TEDDY DOWNEY: No, that makes sense. We’ve got a couple of questions from the audience here. So, maybe start to throw these in there. They sort of build off some of the things we’ve already talked about. So, farmers are overpaying on seed technology fees for GM crops. How can the new Congress and Trump administration address this? We already talked a little bit about patents. Any other thoughts on how to fix the seed market?
ANDY GREEN: Yeah, absolutely. I really commend readers to take a look at our report from March 2023 called “More and Better Choices” [34:50 – Andy loses connection here.]
TEDDY DOWNEY: I think we might have lost him. Big Seed didn’t want us to answer that question, it looks like, Susan. It cut off. Stick with us. We’ve got a couple questions in the queue. Again, if you have questions, throw them in this questions pane. Or you can email us at editorial@thecapitolforum.com.
[38:35 – Andy comes back on]
ANDY GREEN: Hey, Teddy?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Oh, there you are. All right. Perfect. We’ll wrap up here. You got cut off when you were answering how to fix the seed market.
ANDY GREEN: Yeah. So, a couple of things. One is, I think we need much more transparency in the kind and variety. Farmers try to buy different kinds of seeds to diversify their crops. Most of them cannot see now, when they go to order, what kind of variety they’re ordering. That’s a risk to the farmers who want to diversify against crop risk.
That’s also a risk to our food and national security, because we might have almost entirely similar genetics across corn and soy, and that’s completely non-transparent. And if you’ve got blights or things, you could have a real crop collapse.
So, enhancing enforcement of the Federal Seed Act, strengthening the Federal Seed Act, and bringing the FTC to the table around that, I think could be quite important. I also think we need to look at Hatch-Waxman style, maybe better than Hatch-Waxman style, ways to bring generics to market. And this requires both cooperation and/or Congressional required cooperation or innovation between USDA, EPA, PTO, and then DOJ and FTC. So that the registration for new products on pesticides or whatnot connects over into supporting seed access for new competitive market entrants.
And then lastly, I think we need a lot more work to support differences between the germplasm and the trait. If you bear with me for just a second, if you think of the trait, hey, this is Roundup Ready, a trait, it’s sort of like an app. Okay, it’s a fabulous app on your computer system. Sure, that should be patented and nobody should be able to knock it off. But if you think of the germplasm that might have one or two really star apps, a handful of really important, but everybody uses them apps, and then maybe thousands of other parts of the germplasm operating system, being able to access that operating system by different market participants, I think is really a key thing to promoting competition, generic access, bringing prices down, increasing diversity and choice. for farmer economic security and for crop resiliency. That’s sort of the way I would think about the seed sector.
TEDDY DOWNEY: We’ve got another question that is sort of in the same vein. What do you think is the impact on fair competition of combined IP regulatory marketing and litigation strategies by large dominant agribusiness companies? I mean, I guess this gets back to this how do you use the laws to address the dominance by these agribusiness companies using these different strategies to continue their dominant position. We’ve already talked about it a little bit, but any additional thoughts on this question?
ANDY GREEN: Yeah. You know, I think that having a diversity of tools for government and pro-competition tools is one of the really tremendous insights that Tim Wu and the Biden administration brought to the fore with the executive order on competition. If you’re only depending on like one set of tools whatever it is, Section 2 or whatnot, you’re really dependent on one thread of court cases, you’ve got a sort of flip side monopoly set of actors on the governmental side. But if you can bring a lot of different regulatory, state attorneys general, different things to the table, it just becomes more vehicles that can open up the markets.
And that’s sort of where I would go in terms of—it took us 40 years to get us to this super consolidated set of markets we have today. We’ve been four years turning it in the other direction. I hope we continue to go in this direction for the next four years. I don’t know whether we will or not. But it’s going to take a while and a lot of different tools to keep us opening up that market and countering the type of hyper consolidation that is really a problem for just about everybody.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, I note that they haven’t repealed the executive order on competition yet. So, we’ll know in the next 45 days if that gets added to the list, but something to keep an eye on. It seems like that was very effective. We’ve got three more questions. I’ll ping you with these in the queue. Is there a concern that the Trump tariffs will impact competition in the ag industry?
ANDY GREEN: That’s an interesting question. Let me make two or three observations. One is, Trump’s approach to tariffs is kind of unpredictable. So, it’s hard to say yes or no, what exactly will happen there. It could be done in a very damaging way. Or it could be done in a way that doesn’t make much difference. Hard to say right now.
A second thing I’d point out is that Katherine Tai, USTR, made a really wonderful, wonderful set of remarks at Open Markets Institute, I think this last spring, this last summer. I really encourage everyone to listen to them. Where she makes the point that we need to be looking at trade and international economics as an extension of part of the same toolkit of countering concentration of power and balancing bargaining power that exists domestically.
And if you think about this example, this is something that Danny Rodrik has been saying. It’s something that I said along with some of my colleagues over at the Center for American Progress and others. Where if you have capital that’s movable, globally across borders, but workers and farmers that are not movable across borders, just the ability to move that capital or threaten to move that capital inherently lowers the bargaining power of workers. And you need policy, whether it be trade policy, antitrust policy, and a range of other types of policies, both domestically and internationally, to balance that bargaining power so that workers, farmers, domestic businesses are not on the short end of the stick. And I think those things have to be thought about together for going forward as well.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, I know that Trump’s policy, it’s not really coherent right now in terms of how he’s going to be using these negotiating powers and trade. He hired all these antitrust people who look like they’ll crack down on Big Tech, but then has basically been threatening international enforcers with retaliation if they whack the same companies that he plans on going after domestically. So, that there seems to be a disconnect, at least right now with the Trump—between competition and trade. And we’ll have to see how that plays out. To your point, it’s just hard to know just because it’s not really a coherent corporate power strategy right now. Got another question right here. Hi there. When you say bringing generics to market, are we speaking about brand name pesticides?
ANDY GREEN: So, we’re speaking about brand name pesticides, but also the seed. So, you think of seeds and pesticides as a package where you need the seed to be able to access certain pesticides. Yes, that package goes together.
Now, I think it’s notable that pesticides are a valuable tool, but they’re also a tool that has limits to its use. I am far from the scientific expert on these types of things. But we have not seen a real diversity of options for farmers to move beyond the kind of narrow pesticide, one option, that seems to have worked. Now they’re adding Dicamba, which is not the world’s best thing to be adding.
I think part of the reason why the country has backed itself into this jam is the lack of competition, a lack of innovation, that we’ve had in that interaction between seeds and then how to control pesticides. If you had more of a competitive open market, and frankly, a broader set of ways of thinking about diversification and risk, I have to think that you would be able to have systems out there that would not kind of threaten crop collapse, whether it be from overuse of these things or resistance or too much chemicals or whatnot.
Right now, we’re trying to rely on more precision technology. Okay, that’s great. But we also have to think about what are the concentrating effects of the big data required to do precision and the big capital investments behind that. So again, take a look at the report that USDA put out in March 2023. It’s thoughtful on some of those areas.
TEDDY DOWNEY: You mentioned before the national security risk. It just seems like when you’re putting all your eggs in this one basket of like, okay, you’ve got this one type of seed and everything’s kind of based on that type of seed, it seems like a risky proposition, not a lot of redundancy, not a lot of diversity. It seems problematic from a national security standpoint, just to bring up a point that you made earlier.
ANDY GREEN: It is from my perspective. And I think that we sort of, in some way, maybe backed ourselves into this. There are some of these advisory groups around biotechnology stewardship that, until very recently, only had the big seed companies at the table with the EPA. I think that may be beginning to open up a little bit. But I think having different voices and really a voice of the farmer, a voice of the long-term interest of the farmer that USDA historically has brought into the transportation universe, going all the way back to 1946 and before, bringing that voice of the farmer into the seed and biotech universe, I think, or at least doing it in a way that’s a little bit different, is one of the innovations that maybe we tried to offer. And we’ll see if it can be continued and built upon.
TEDDY DOWNEY: All right. We’ve got one last question here. When you talk with actual farmers and livestock producers on the ground, not the associations that represent them, but actual producers, they are really unhappy with how their choices have diminished over the decades. The associations are the conduit to the Congress. So, how do we harness a farmer voice to break through the noise to Congress?
ANDY GREEN: So, I agree that there’s a lot of farmer frustration. I also agree that farmers have very strong viewpoints when you talk to them directly. You know, I think there’s a diversity of associations. We’ve fortunately been pretty—we have strong support across a lot of different associations in the work we’re doing, the work we did under the Biden-USDA. So, I’m very pleased with that. You know, the problems, for example, in poultry were very apparent to everybody that participated in them.
When you talk to actual individual farmers, I think also they’re businesspeople. They want to be treated more fairly. They want to have fair choices. They want to be able to compete. They recognize they need processors to be able to be economically successful, too, and that’s sort of why antitrust and competition and sort of these fair market set of authorities is attractive because it’s about making capitalism work, real competition, honest to goodness capitalism.
So, to the extent that the challenges that we face in ag get diverted or confused here in Washington or up on Capitol Hill, I think that—I guess I come back to building momentum around doing things that are workable and have worked is one of the most practical ways to show we can do this change. And Congress and administration leaders, don’t be afraid to keep making progress on behalf of competition because it yields real results. It’s not scary except for the folks who are doing wrong things, and it’s a core American value of choice competition and open markets. So, that’s what we ought to be standing by and delivering. So, building on the momentum is where I fall back to show that it’s possible to do these things. And the scared voices that get filtered through some association groups don’t need to be listened to.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Well, there’s a jackhammer right outside my office decided to start going. So, I think that’s our cue to end the call, but Andy, thank you so much for doing this. Look forward to seeing what you do next, and I can’t thank you enough for your time today.
ANDY GREEN: My pleasure, Teddy. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all your work at The Capitol Forum. And good luck. Happy to continue to be a resource.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And thanks everyone for joining the call today. This concludes the call. Bye-bye.
