How "national champions" are reshaping the global meat industry
By Kate Sievert, Phil Howard, Alex San Martim Portes and Marina Yamaoka
In recent years, Brazil’s JBS and China’s WH Group have become some of the leading meat processing firms in global meat supply chains. Their rise wasn’t purely a result of corporate strategy. Both companies benefited from policies designed to build “national champions” — firms supported by their governments to grow into global leaders in ‘strategic sectors’.
These policies include generous state-backed loans, preferential treatment in domestic markets, and political shielding during overseas expansion. The stated goal? Economic expansion and a secure domestic food supply.
In practice, however, national champion policies have helped concentrate the market power of a few very large firms — intensifying the harmful impacts of industrial meat production. Consolidation in global meat supply chains has accelerated environmental degradation, worsened animal welfare conditions and, displaced small-scale producers. It has also contributed to rising food prices and precarious labour conditions.
But the story is slightly more complicated than a battle between state-driven firms and traditional publicly listed corporations. Rather than disrupting entrenched power structures in supply chains, these national champions have been integrated into them. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — asset managers with no allegiance to any one country — own substantial shares in global meat firms across the board.
In this light, these emerging meat processing giants begin to look less like conduits for national sovereignty and more like new vessels for transnational capital.
A global game of gin rummy
The way in which these state-backed firms grow warrants attention, too. Our analysis tracked the mergers and acquisitions of the top 25 global meat processors over two decades. We observed that almost all major meat processing firms regularly swapped divisions and subsidiaries in what US investor Warren Buffett once called a “gin rummy” strategy — discarding less profitable assets and picking up those that improve market position. This has allowed a handful of players to consolidate control over key segments in global meat supply chains.
But an interesting finding was that national champions — especially JBS and WH Group — engage in a disproportionately larger number of gin rummy swaps than incumbent meat processing firms like Tyson Foods or Cargill. It seems that with a safety net of state resources, more aggressive and higher-risk deals can be pursued.
In 2007, for example, JBS leapt from a regional beef processor to global multi-species meat processor almost overnight by acquiring a US-based meatpacking firm, Swift, which was then the third-largest meat processor in the US.
A year later, JBS bought beef operations from Smithfield Foods. Then in 2009 JBS acquired a majority stake in Pilgrim’s Pride, enabling it to become the second-largest poultry company in the US. Each move was boldfaced, highly leveraged, and made possible by state-backed capital.
China's WH Group followed a similar path. In 2013, it bought the much bigger Smithfield Foods for $7 billion — the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of a US firm. This was facilitated by a rapid $4 billion loan from the Bank of China which was approved in just one day.
Shifts in power in the meat processing industry
These mergers and investments have helped consolidate the global meat processing sector into a profitable, politically strategic, and increasingly central industry to debates about global food security.
State-backed meat processor firms are increasingly outgrowing traditional market leaders in food systems long dominated by Western corporations, marking a shift in who holds power and whom these food systems serve. This trend points to a broader realignment in the global political economy, where national policies and corporate strategies reshape markets in unsustainable and extractive ways.
In the context of increasingly volatile global trade relations, national champion firms like JBS or WH Group may stand to benefit from new market openings, particularly as US firms such as Tyson Foods may risk losing access to Chinese export markets. JBS has previously demonstrated such opportunism, using their Australian subsidiary to export meat to the EU when Brazilian firms faced restrictions in 2008. However, the unpredictable nature of US tariff decisions makes predicting future outcomes difficult.
National champion policies are often justified as a means to stimulate domestic growth, job creation, and global industry competitiveness. Yet it would seem in practice, such policies frequently reinforce corporate power at the expense of broader public benefit.
Our analysis shows that today’s global food regimes are shaped not only by states or corporations, but by hybrid actors that straddle both — firms like JBS or China’s COFCO, which operate simultaneously as instruments of state strategy and vehicles for capital accumulation.
This poses a challenge for regulatory efforts that remain unequipped to address the systemic consequences of financialised, state-backed accumulation.
The case for a global competition treaty
While academic and advocacy focus has rightly been levelled at agri-food firms from the global North, there is an urgent need to reckon with the new power dynamics emerging. In particular, we need to pay closer attention to how national development strategies intersect with corporate expansion, and what that means for global governance.
One pathway to address this issue could be through a global competition treaty that would provide a framework for regulating mergers and acquisitions across borders. At present, competition law is largely national in jurisdiction, but meat companies, like many others in food systems and beyond, operate through global webs of subsidiaries, holding companies, and cross-shareholdings. These firms may deploy anticompetitive advantages globally and regulation that is capable of restricting this becomes a challenge.
Of course, any global treaty must account for the diverse interests of countries in the global South. Many governments see corporate champions as vital to their development strategies. But that cannot justify unchecked consolidation, nor the outsourcing of governance to transnational capital. Instead, we need a governance approach that acknowledges the right of countries to pursue economic development while ensuring that corporate power, North or South, does not come at the cost of the public good.
Such a treaty would not be an easy task, but the current state-of-play is unsustainable and unjust. In the end, national champions are not really national. They are tools structured to extract, accumulate, and conquer for the benefit of a tiny minority.
Kate Sievert is a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University, Australia. Phil Howard is a Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University, USA. Alex San Martim Portes is a consultant at Think Change Resolve, Australia. Marina Yamaoka is a PhD candidate at Université Gustave Eiffel, France.