Document Type

Report

Publication Date

5-2026

Abstract

Climate advocates may hope to see dramatic commercial breakthroughs over the next several decades that reshape emissions-intensive components of our everyday lives, such as our dietary choices, household energy use, and transportation habits. Yet transforming these consumer sectors will require not only scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial ambition, but also nimble competition policy to address complex market dynamics.

Sustainable food production likely necessitates substantial departure from traditional livestock-management practices. Agricultural production currently generates about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions (“GHGs”). Animal livestock account for the largest share, while occupying roughly 40% of the Earth’s habitable land, much of which could otherwise offer greater GHG-absorption opportunities. Alternative proteins delivered through novel plant and meat products can thus play a pivotal role in climate mitigation by reducing GHG emissions, while also promising notable benefits in animal welfare, national food security, supply-chain resiliency, long-term human health, food safety, and pandemic prevention (via reduced antibiotic usage). Widespread adoption of these protein sources, however, must overcome multiple market obstacles.

This study of alternative-proteins markets is part of a series probing where anticompetitive pressures have arisen across emerging sectors crucial for addressing our climate crisis. Part One offers analogies of horizontal consolidation’s recent competitive harms in adjacent sectors, through large meat processors’ “coordinated effects” capacity to fix prices and wages, as well as pharmaceutical giants’ “killer acquisitions” of would-be disruptive drug projects. Part Two traces multiple chokepoints in alternative-proteins supply chains, including: dual-role upstream commodity suppliers simultaneously operating as downstream retail competitors, cost-prohibitive R&D or product-scaling challenges, scarcity of pilot-project lab infrastructure, and commercial-distribution norms that preference established industry “captains.” Part Three considers how alternative-proteins firms’ emulation of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ “patent thicket” IP strategies, or of traditional food-sector trade secrets, can constrain a technological breakthrough from fulfilling its broad market-catalyzing potential. Part Four surveys how inconsistent state laws, cumbersome multi-agency approval processes, and divergent international regulatory policies further hinder an alternative-protein start-up’s ability to compete on product quality. Part Four also addresses the understandable concerns of economic displacement that drive certain constituencies’ political pushback against this sector’s untrammeled growth. Throughout, the paper describes how each of these competition pressures may undermine urgently needed market development — and concomitant climate progress — in our food system.

Disciplines

Antitrust and Trade Regulation | Environmental Law | Food and Drug Law | Law

Download

Share

COinS