Restructuring U.S. meatpacking as a resilience strategy against capacity disruptions: will it work?

To guard against future COVID-19 type capacity disruptions in the highly concentrated meatpacking industry, the U.S. government is embarking on a resilience strategy that expands the processing capacity of smaller meat processing establishments. Using a dominant-oligopoly competitive-fringe (DO/CF) model, and defining resilience as an equilibrium in which meat production continues undisrupted, I show that, in theory, resilience is achievable if DO prices meat competitively and shares the market equally with CF. Since the two conditions are unlikely to occur in practice, the resilience strategy is unlikely to work.