Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?

Transcript“Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.” Hi, Paul Krugman here. That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement. The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory. So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.Rather oddly, he didn’t say from where and wouldn’t say from where for a while. And then eventually said, well, from Argentina, Brazil, and other places.There has been a substantial uproar over these imports of ground beef because of concerns about safety. You know, if he won’t even say where it’s coming from or whether the countries involved are going to be practicing food safety, that is kind of an issue. And it turns out it’s not just, you know, not just woke liberal types but ranchers, lawmakers and food safety experts who were very concerned about the plan and were not reassured when Trump said the meat is “very clean and very good.”Okay, little by little details are coming out about how all of this happened. It turns out that the initial plan to allow the beef imports was announced the day after a closed door meeting between Trump and a Brazilian meat packing billionaire who is a major donor to Trump.And they went right ahead and announced the plan, although again without details. There doesn’t seem to have been much discussion of how this would work, of the concerns. After some initial blowback — even ranchers are concerned that people might become worried about the safety of U.S. beef — Trump announced that he was going to also allow farmers and ranchers to process their own beef rather than having to go through the regular meatpacking companies. But it turned out that the ranchers hate that too, because what they want is for people to believe that beef is safe. They want to be assured that there are quality standards being upheld.And now that we have at least some information about the origins of the beef, we are even less reassured. In fact, just the other day, the European Union banned beef imports from Brazil because Brazil was not adhering to EU standards on the use of antibiotics. So there are, in fact, real concerns here about safety.Okay, this is quite a story, and beef is not that trivial a product, but there’s a lot of secondary implications here. The first is that this is a very Trumpian story. It’s got this sort of characteristic combination of raw corruption and raw incompetence. Raw might not have been the best word to use here, but anyway. The corruption: Obviously, this was a decision made because somebody who has given Trump’s campaign and possibly Trump himself money had a meeting with him and got an immediate policy change. So this certainly looks like undue influence. We don’t know exactly how it happened because it was a closed-door meeting.Also, shouldn’t somebody have been in the room to or at least passed on this before it was announced to say, you know, is this a good idea? Shouldn’t there have been somebody from the Agriculture Department, somebody from the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, but certainly someone from food safety to pass judgment or give some warning?In a normal administration, any kind of decision like this involves a process in which multiple agencies get a chance to weigh in and in which somebody who knows something gets to say, look, there are real problems with this idea. But obviously that didn’t happen here. And basically it doesn’t happen in this administration.This is an administration that does not like experts. Does not listen to expertise. That’s not just a result of particular personnel decisions that Trump made. That is just a defining characteristic. At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions.The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged. That’s across the board. Basically, it’s Hegseths all the way down in this administration.And so in this case, nobody was there apparently to say, this is really not a very good idea. And I think it’s really striking that even Trump thought, well, okay, I can fix this. At least I can mend fences with the ranchers by giving them more leeway to be unregulated themselves. But it turns out that the ranchers want regulation. They want customers to know that the beef that t