About
The Open Markets Fair Food & Farming Systems program develops and advocates for policies that promote more resilient and environmentally sustainable food systems for the benefit of farmers, food chain workers, and consumers. The program aims to accomplish these goals by studying and exposing the pervasive corporate power and economic concentration throughout the food system.
Fewer and fewer dominant corporations control nearly every step along the food supply chain, from seeds to processing and grocery stores. Such consolidated power pushes farmers off the land, endangers food workers and suppresses their wages, harms animals and the environment, and sickens eaters. Big Food corporations translate their economic power into political influence to write the rules in their favor, further entrenching an abusive food system that serves no one other than corporate shareholders.
Open Markets believes that market regulation plays a critical role in balancing power in food markets and in leveling the playing field for a greater diversity of food businesses to flourish. The Food & Agriculture program has led the way revealing rigged food markets and corporate abuses through its biweekly Food & Power newsletter. The program has also outlined policy proposals to create fairer food markets, including structural antitrust enforcement, reforms to the Packers & Stockyards Act, bans on predatory pricing and exclusive dealing, and many more.
Open Markets Institute was mentioned in an article in support of Beth Baltzan, an adviser to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office and a former senior fellow at OMI, who is being targeted by Big Tech firms and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.