Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue decided not to move forward with an interim final rule of the so-called Farmer Fair Practices Rules, which was written in 2016 by the US Department of Agriculture’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). The agency also announced it will take no further action on a proposed regulation of the Farmer Fair Practices Rules.

"We’re very pleased that the secretary will withdraw these bad regulations, which would have had a devastating impact on America’s pork producers," said NPPC President Ken Maschhoff, a pork producer from Carlyle, Illinois.

"The regulations would have restricted the buying and selling of livestock, led to consolidation of the livestock industry – putting farmers out of business – and increased consumer prices for meat."

The interim final rule would have broadened the scope of the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) of 1921 related to using "unfair, unjustly discriminatory or deceptive practices" and to giving "undue or unreasonable preferences or advantages".

Specifically, it would have made such actions per se violations of federal law even if they didn’t harm competition or cause competitive injury, prerequisites for winning PSA cases. (The proposed rule would have defined the terms in the interim final rule.)

USDA in 2010 proposed several PSA provisions – collectively known as the GIPSA Rule – that Congress mandated in the 2008 Farm Bill. Although lawmakers did not include a provision eliminating the need to prove a competitive injury to win a PSA lawsuit, the agency included one in its proposed regulation.

NPPC was the leading voice in opposition to the broader GIPSA rule, generating in 2010 more than 16,000 comments from pork producers against it, and to the interim final rule. It got about 2,000 comments early this year in opposition to that rule.

"Eliminating the need to prove injury to competition would have prompted an explosion in PSA lawsuits by turning every contract dispute into a federal case subject to triple damages," Mr Maschhoff said.

"The inevitable costs associated with that and the legal uncertainty it would have created likely would have caused further vertical integration of our industry and driven packers to own more of their own hogs.

"That would have reduced competition, stifled innovation and provided no benefits to anyone other than trial lawyers and activist groups that no doubt would have used the rule to attack the livestock industry."

An Informa Economics study found that the 2010 GIPSA Rule today would have cost the US pork industry more than $420 million annually – more than $4 per hog – with most of the costs related to PSA lawsuits brought under the "no competitive injury" provision included in the interim final rule.