The so-called "Food Security and Farm Protection Act," S. 1326, a repackaged version of the EATS Act, would invalidate existing laws banning the cruelest methods of confinement for farm animals. According to the ASPCA, this would include laws in 15 states, including ballot measures that passed with wide public support. S. 1326, introduced by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), would also stop states from passing new laws regulating agricultural products, creating a disastrous race to the bottom, not just for animal protection, but also for laws that protect farmers, workers, consumers and the environment. The bill would undo over a decade of progress made in improving the lives of farm animals, reduce consumers’ access to more humane animal products, and further encourage the growth of the factory farm industry by eliminating states’ ability to regulate its harmful practices.
TAKE ACTION: Stop the so-called "Food Security and Farm Protection Act," U.S. Senate Bill 1326!
In 2018, California banned on the sale of pork from hogs bred in gestation crates. A majority of the state voted to pass that law (Prop 12) and the US Supreme Court upheld the ballot initiative in 2023. S. 1326 is the industry's attempt to undo the ruling. The name of the bill is ironic as it would, in fact, weaken food security and remove protections for farmers, while rolling back animal welfare standards. The top beneficiaries would be foreign corporations.
The U.S. is quickly becoming an agricultural colony of foreign countries. China owns Smithfield, the largest U.S. pork producer; Brazilian JBS is the biggest U.S. beef company; and U.S. corn farmers are the main market for the pesticide companies Syngenta (ChemChina), and BASF and Bayer (German corporations that were part of the Nazi I.G. Farben conglomerate).
What if China doesn't want to comply with bans on caging pregnant and nursing sows to sell its pork? What if Brazil doesn't like Environmental Protection Agency rules on water pollution from its factory farm feedlots? What if Chinese and German pesticide companies get caught giving people cancer or killing "off target" crops that aren't genetically engineered to withstand the toxic herbicides that drift from fields sprayed with their poisons?
These foreign companies go to the U.S. Congress to demand relief! Incredibly, our members of Congress comply, crafting special provisions to exempt bad actors from rules the states and the courts are trying to enforce.
Language nearly identical to the Food Security and Farm Protection Act was included in the 2024 Farm Bill, Sec. 12007, "Ensuring the Free Movement of Livestock-Derived Products in Interstate Commerce."
In 2018, California voters passed Proposition 12, a ballot initiative to raise the animal welfare standards of food sold in their state. They banned pork from factory farms where pregnant and nursing sows are contained in cages so small that they can't even move enough to turn around.
Sec. 12007 said that farmers, including those controlled by China's Smithfield, could raise their pigs however they like and have the right to sell their pork wherever they want no matter what state or local laws say. This was an incredibly dangerous provision, because pork farmers working for Smithfield don't get to decide how to raise their pigs, China does!
China wants to raise pork in the U.S. the same way it does at home. From 2018 to 2019, African Swine Fever put most Chinese pork farmers out of business. This gave the country the opportunity to rebuild pork production at a hyper-industrial scale. Prior to 1995, almost all Chinese pork came from small-scale family farms. Less than 15 years later, commercial operations producing 50 to 1,000 pigs exceeded small farms. As of 2021, small farms were down to 20 percent of pork production, with 40 percent in operations with up to 1,000 sows and the other 40 percent in mega-operations with more than 1,000 sows. As of 2025, 65 percent of pork is estimated to come from mega-operations, 30 percent from commercial operations and just 5 percent from small farms. What are being built in China today are "hog hotels." A single operation can have 21 buildings, six stories high with 660 sows each. One company is producing 30 million hogs a year this way, equal to 21 percent of U.S. pork production in 2020.
Another Farm Bill provision to benefit foreign companies that don't feel like complying with state laws or the rulings of U.S. courts hasn't been reintroduced yet, Sec. 10204, "Uniformity of Pesticide Labeling Requirements." That one was for Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018 and ever since has been trying to avoid compensating Roundup-exposed cancer victims suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma for using this toxic herbicide.
In 2020, Bayer agreed to pay roughly $10 billion in a landmark settlement, but tens of thousands of additional claims remain unresolved. Bayer is on the hook for billions of dollars more for acting with “malice, oppression or fraud.” The legal theory is "failure to warn," based on the fact that Monsanto knew its glyphosate-based herbicide caused cancer.
Sec. 10204 would have helped Bayer escape liability by preventing the Courts from imposing any rules more strict than what the Environmental Protection Agency requires. The backstory is, in 1985, an EPA panel classified glyphosate as a Class C chemical (suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential) based on kidney tumors in male mice. Then, Monsanto barraged it with bogus research about its safety until the EPA reversed its position six years later. Monsanto's been running the EPA and Bayer's still trying to control it now, with a petition demanding the EPA block glyphosate-exposed cancer victims from suing it for "failure to warn."
U.S. regulators should have never allowed Germany to take over the U.S. pesticide market or China to take over U.S. pork production, but the least we can do is to maintain the fundamental rights of people living in a so-called democracy to access the courts for redress of wrongs and to pass laws at the state and local level to regulate how these foreign corporations are going to operate on our soil.
Congress has to hear from us about how disturbed we are to hand over our food supply to foreign countries.
TAKE ACTION: Stop the so-called "Food Security and Farm Protection Act," U.S. Senate Bill 1326!