Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday steps to foster competition and protect consumers in the meatpacking and poultry industry amid national supply chain issues. Garland announced the new measures at President Biden’s roundtable meeting on “promoting competition and reducing prices in the meatpacking industry.”

In the coming year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will partner with the Department of Agriculture to better administer the Packers and Stockyards Act. The Act, passed in 1921, assures “fair competition and fair trade practices” to protect ranchers, farmers and customers from unfair practices in the livestock, meat and poultry industries. The DOJ will launch a “centralized, accessible portal” within 30 days to collect reports of potential violations of the three key pieces of antitrust legislation: the Packers and Stockyards Act, the Clayton Act and the Sherman Act.

According to a press release from the White House, one independent poultry producer “described the dominant poultry production model in which large, integrated companies dictate the terms of restrictive contracts that leave growers with little control over their own operations and laden them with debt.” In his remarks, Garland argued that such “anticompetitive practices in agriculture, as in any industry, hurt the American people – producers, consumers and workers alike. And they hurt the American economy.” Garland assured the roundtable attendees that his department will protect any whistleblowers under the new anti-retaliation protections passed by Congress in 2020.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said he was “heartened” by the renewed efforts of the Biden Administration to enforce “complex [and] difficult” areas of law in order to protect producers and consumers.