MEAT BILLS ARE ON THE MENU IN CONGRESS.

• Author: Linnekin, Baylen
• Position: FOOD

AMERICA'S MEAT SUPPLY has been hammered by COVID-19 outbreaks at many of the nation's largest meat processing plants, and consumer meat prices have spiked as a result. The nation's small-and mid-sized farms and ranches could help address these issues if ranchers and farmers had better access to small-scale slaughtering and processing facilities and to local and regional markets. But to get those things, they first need Congress to get off its rump and vote.

Three very different meat processing reform bills are now before Congress. One is great. One is good. And one is suspect. Just what does each bill propose to do?

THE NEW MARKETS for State-Inspected Meat and Poultry Act--the good bill--would foster regional food systems by lifting a senseless ban on the interstate sale of state-inspected meat. Under current federal law, meat produced and inspected by authorities in 20 states cannot be sold elsewhere solely because those states use their own inspectors, rather than U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees, to enforce food-safety regulations. That approach makes so little sense that even the USDA has said it embraces the aims of the bill.

What the New Markets Act doesn't address, though, is the overall capacity or supply shortfalls that have caused the present meat crisis. That's where the great bill--the PRIME Act--shines. That bill would create and strengthen local food systems by allowing the intrastate sale of uninspected meat and meat products.

Under current law, cuts of meat from a ranch that uses what's known as a "custom" facility--subject to a host of federal and state regulations but without an on-site government inspector--cannot be sold to the public at all. The PRIME Act would allow such ranchers to sell that meat within their home states directly to consumers and through local grocers, butchers, and restaurants. By allowing the local sale of meat from these operations, the PRIME Act would encourage the proliferation of small-scale processors, adding diversity, resilience, and badly needed additional capacity to our national processing system. (The bill would also allow states to adapt or adopt their own inspection requirements for custom facilities.)

Now the more dubious option: The RAMP-UP Act would authorize the USDA to provide five- and six-figure grants to existing small- and mid-sized processing...