Understanding Trump’s Invocation of the Defense Production Act for Meat

Earlier this year, in the midst of meat processing plant closures due to a high incidence of coronavirus infections among workers, President Trump issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to prevent disruptions in the U.S. food supply chain caused by the pandemic. By invoking the DPA, the order effectively designated meat and poultry as products “essential to the national defense.”

For many Americans, thinking about food may be more likely to conjure up an image of a burger than concerns about national security. But a country’s security rests in part on the strength of its food supply chain. An abundance of food can lead a nation into a position of global legitimacy—and the absence of food can lead to a state’s downfall. For this reason, food is a fundamental pillar of national security considerations in the modern era. This context helps explain why problems in meat production led the president to invoke a statute designed to preserve the nation’s security.

What Is the Role of Food in National Security?

Generally speaking, food has taken on two roles in national security discourse: as a guardian of homeland security and as a weapon of war. While the connection between food and national security may be understood implicitly by U.S. lawmakers, the justification for this linkage requires an analysis of the part food has played in several major national security events from modern history.

History has shown us, perhaps most recently with the Arab Spring, that food insecurity, “a lack of consistent access to enough food,” can precipitate civil unrest. Though large-scale civil unrest is most likely to occur in countries with unstable political regimes, hunger drives people to “extreme and extraordinary behavior” as they fight to survive. When these behaviors turn violent, individual hunger on a mass scale often merits increased defense and military spending to respond to a threat that can rise to the regional, national or global level. Thus, starvation, in addition to its direct impact on civilian mortality rates, can be viewed as a national security threat.

In the U.S., hunger prevention has become an important part of the response to a national security event. For example, during World War I, the U.S.’s food supply chain came under stress when farmworkers were sent to fight overseas and European farmlands were turned into battlefields. Victory gardens emerged as a way for Americans back home to join in the war effort by contributing to the U.S. food supply. The idea was for Americans to grow food in idle spaces, such as backyards or fire escapes. Even children were invited to enlist as “soldiers of the soil” by joining the U.S. School Garden Army. The victory garden movement emerged again during World War II, when an estimated 20 million gardens provided nearly 40 percent of the nation’s fresh vegetables at one point.

Conversely, the national security implications of the need for food for survival is that cutting off the enemy’s food supply is a method of killing that poses little to no risk to the troops effectuating the “attack.” For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan plotted to use mass starvation as a tool to enable Germany to prevail in its occupation of the USSR—a region in which German troops were vastly outnumbered. However, history has shown that there are other ways food can be transformed into a weapon in the modern world, such as the U.S. and USSR’s “farms race”—a struggle to innovate and revolutionize their respective food production systems for maximum output as a symbol of legitimacy and industrial might during the Cold War.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has recognized a new food-related national security threat: agroterrorism, defined by the Congressional Research Service as “the deliberate introduction of an animal or plant disease with the goal of generating fear, causing economic losses, and/or undermining social stability.” This threat is distinct from a starvation strategy because it focuses on intimidation and coercion rather than only effectuating civilian deaths. Since 9/11, the U.S. has more than tripled its appropriations for agriculture-related homeland security activities.

Why Did Meat Processing Plant Closures Threaten U.S. National Security?

The national security concerns surrounding the meat plant closures in April can be unambiguously understood in the category of food as a guardian of homeland security. The part that merits discussion, and concern, is why the closure of a few meat processing plants threatened to “break” the U.S. food supply chain. Consolidation of the U.S. food supply chain as well as a patchwork regulatory regime contributed to the heightened concerns over meat processing plant closures. These structural defects paved the way for executive involvement to avoid a food shortage at a scale rising to the level of a national security threat.

The U.S. has been plagued by aggressive consolidation at every level of the food supply chain over the past few decades. As a result, a smaller number of companies operate fewer and larger meatpacking facilities. For example, […]

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