The midterm election season is under way, and over the past few weeks, Democrats held two events in Washington, D.C.—a roundtable and a subsequent press conference—signaling a major strategy focused on food prices as well as corporate consolidation.

Food prices were a key issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Donald Trump blaming then-President Joe Biden for record inflation and former Vice President Kamala Harris calling out corporate price gouging.

At the Capitol Hill roundtable on Feb. 26, hosted by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), farmers, union leaders, lawyers, academics, and hunger advocates railed against policies they say have allowed corporations to get too big. They say the policies hurt consumers by making them pay more at the register, and also hurt farmers, who earn less for what they produce.

“We no longer have truly free markets. In the food supply chain, either a single monopolist or a tight oligopoly controls each of the major industries involved,” said Basel Musharbash, a managing attorney for the Antimonopoly Counsel, at the roundtable. “It’s become a systemic feature of our food system, and these self-appointed autocrats of trade are the primary drivers of today’s unaffordable food prices.”

While prices of some individual items have dropped, food prices across the board went up about 3 percent in 2025. Senate Democrats have zeroed in on that fact.

Democrats scheduled those events in response to Republican efforts to position themselves as making progress on lowering costs. In multiple speeches over the past month, President Trump and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have said that food prices have come down in the past year. During the State of the Union, Trump said the price of eggs had dropped 60 percent.

“Under Trump’s leadership, inflation has slowed, meaning prices are coming down,” Rollins wrote in a January op-ed. “Key nutritional food items—from fresh chicken to potatoes, citrus to eggs—are down, in some cases up to 25 percent.”

But while prices of some individual items have dropped, food prices across the board went up about 3 percent in 2025. Senate Democrats zeroed in on that fact at the roundtable.

“He’s simply lying to the American people when it comes to food costs,” Schumer said. “He calls the whole thing—affordability—a hoax. What an insult to a family that can’t afford to adequately feed their children.”

Corporate Consolidation

While some lawmakers and witnesses at the table decried Republican cuts to food aid, the central issue was corporate consolidation. Corporate control of farming and supply chains is not only driving up prices, they argued, it is also pushing farmers out of business. A central message to voters will be that Trump’s industry-friendly policies are making the situation worse.

Food prices, in reality, are influenced by a complex set of factors.

Under President Joe Biden, prices rose dramatically in 2022, a spike most experts attributed to pandemic disruptions and other supply chain issues, some of it driven by drought and bird flu. Inflation slowed in 2023 and cooled considerably in 2024. It has continued at a similar rate in 2025 under Trump.

Concentrated markets can lead to higher prices by reducing competition. They can also enable price fixing and price gouging by major companies, which can use an emergency or inflation to raise prices even higher. Advocates have noted, for example, that during the worst periods of price spikes attributed to bird flu, egg giant Cal-Maine lodged record profits. After the disruptions waned, prices remained elevated.

At the roundtable, Democrats argued they are trying to address these systemic drivers, including in bills introduced by lawmakers including Schumer, Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico) and Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).

Democrats argued they are trying to address these systemic drivers of higher prices, including in bills introduced by lawmakers.

Farm Action Fund President Joe Maxwell, who farms in Missouri, called on Congress to implement reforms to the agricultural checkoff system, which mandates individual farmers pay into marketing funds that are often allocated to organizations that instead lobby for corporate interests.

Booker has proposed legislation during previous farm bill cycles that would introduce guardrails to ensure checkoff funds are used to benefit farmers instead of corporations.

Maxwell also said during his testimony that lawmakers should do more to protect farmers and ranchers from exploitation at the hands of meatpackers. That could mean eliminating a contentious policy that forces them to prove “harm to competition” in order to sue meatpackers under the Packers and Stockyards Act. Biden’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finalized a rule that would accomplish that, but meat industry groups are challenging it and Trump’s last USDA threw out similar rules. If Congress were to write it into law, it would be harder for future administrations or court cases to undo.

Competition, Technology, Privacy

During his testimony, Kansas rancher and meat processor Mike Callicrate called for better anti-trust enforcement, focusing on industries where concentration is harming competition, and for the federal government to do more to buy food directly from smaller producers and processors.

Biden ramped up anti-trust enforcement, including in agriculture, during his presidency, but Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has largely dialed it back. After rescinding Biden’s executive order on curbing consolidation in the food system and ending a state program that targeted monopolies, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate whether anti-competitive practices used by food and agriculture companies are driving up costs. It is unclear what will come of that order; a similar order he issued in 2020 failed to produce results.

Other witnesses at the roundtable called attention to new technologies that allow grocers to change shelf prices in real time, sometimes based on customer data. Rachel Lyons, legislative director for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), a union that represents grocery and meatpacking workers, said that big players in food retail, including Kroger and Walmart, are already rolling out the systems. Because those giants capture a massive proportion of grocery sales, that could cause prices to rise significantly, she said.

Lyons advocated for the passage of a recent bill introduced by Luján that would make the practice illegal.

Trump’s Trade Deals

As the midterms get closer, Republicans are just as focused on convincing voters they will bring food prices down, but their plans to do so look very different.

President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in February. Behind him are Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). (Photo credit: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump’s main focus has been on importing foods that are facing supply constraints, including eggs and beef. For example, in early February, he signed an executive order to quadruple imports of beef from Argentina, titled “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer.”

In an op-ed last week, Rollins argued that the administration will boost farmer income through a series of trade deals and promoting the export of American farm products around the world. In 2025, she said, the administration signed eight trade agreements, with more to come in 2026. New deals with Malaysia and Cambodia, for example, include opening markets for American beef, pork, poultry, and rice.

Commodity dairy, meat, and grain groups like the National Milk Producers Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have praised some of those deals.

But farmers and ranchers like Maxwell and Callicrate see those groups as representing corporate interests over individual farmers. Too many of Trump’s policies lean in that direction, they said, but tackling consolidation will get at the root of the problem.

“We are calling on Congress to act,” to strengthen anti-trust laws and take up cases that actually break up companies that have gained monopoly power, Maxwell said. “Let’s put competition back in the market. Let’s get farmers fair prices and consumers fair prices.”

One week later, at a press event hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, Schumer announced a bill to do that.

Introduced on March 5, the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act is co-sponsored by 12 Senate Democrats, including Booker, Peter Welch (D-Vermont), and Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona).

Schumer called it a “pro-consumer, pro-competition, pro-worker and pro-farmer bill.” The unprecedented bill would break up the largest meatpacking corporations by requiring them to choose a single line of business rather than producing pork, beef, and poultry. It would focus especially on the beef industry by enacting hard caps on concentration at the regional and national levels and requiring the FTC to order divestitures when companies reach those caps.

Having worked on the issue for years, Booker said at the event, he was encouraged to see more colleagues, and Democratic leadership, taking up the issue. “I do see the Democratic party trying to do what I believe the Democratic party needs to do, which is reinvent itself and show Americans again that we’re fighting for them,” he said.

In less than a year, it’ll be clear whether that message on food costs—or Trump’s—resonates with voters.

Rebekah Alvey contributed additional reporting.

The post Democrats Tie High Food Prices to Corporate Consolidation appeared first on Civil Eats.

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