By Bill Berkowitz / NEWSFORCHANGE
What do hog farms have in common with genetically engineered corn? What do Polish and Greek farmers have in common with Native Americans and small family farmers in the United States? Unchecked corporate globalization.
Come the first week of October, a group of independent farmers and activists from Poland and Greece will be meeting with anti-factory farm activists in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. Topic A on the agenda will be the impact and consequences of the worldwide spread of corporate factory farms. Polish small farmers, who still hold some 80 percent of their country's farmland, are especially concerned that they will not survive a major invasion of large agribusiness corporations from the United States.
Smithfield, Virginia, about 30 miles northwest of Norfolk in southeastern Virginia is the home of Smithfield Foods, Inc. As the largest U.S. hog producer, it has been reeling in record profits during the past two years. In a May 1999 press release, the company acknowledged that its record 1998-99 profits were due to its integrated structure: "[This] gives us a more stable earnings base and eliminates the extreme cyclicality that characterizes the results of many companies in our industry. While we sustained large losses in hog production during fiscal 1999, we achieved record results in our processing operations."
Smithfield's purchase of Murphy Family Farms earlier this year was "another nail in the coffin of independent operators," according to Missouri hog farmer Steve Madewell. And rather than protect the independents, some states, desperate for economic investment, have offered lucrative tax breaks and set minimal environmental regulations in order to attract companies like Smithfield.
"Corporate Hogs at the Public Trough," a 1999 Sierra Club report, details out how, in 1992, Smithfield established the "world's largest hog slaughterhouse" in Bladen County, North Carolina. Not a good neighbor, the company polluted the Cape Fear River almost forty times in the last five years, spilled a million gallons of toxic hog manure into the Trent River and has been responsible for an incredible amount of environmental degradation, according to the Sierra Club.
Now Smithfield is looking to expand its global operations. Through its subsidiary, Carroll's Foods, Inc., Smithfield has already spread its tentacles beyond the borders of the United States, with two operations in Brazil and another hog factory outside the village of Perote near Mexico's Gulf Coast. According to Marlene Halverson, author of another published report, "The Price We Pay for Corporate Pork," giant agribusiness corporations are becoming savvy and adaptable players on the international scene.
Smithfield, Halverson writes, has a 50 percent ownership interest in a Mexican meat processing and hog production company, Agroindustrial Del Noroeste (AND), and the company has acquired meatpacking companies in Canada, France, and Poland, where it is attempting to construct hog production facilities that would be among the largest in the world.
The company currently owns 51 percent of the voting control and 83 percent of the stock in Animex, Poland's largest meat and poultry processing company. Polish small farmers and food workers intend to fight back against Smithfield and other agribusiness companies -- which is one of the main reasons for their visit. In addition, they will be getting in touch with activists from groups advocating sustainable agriculture.
Getting around the law
According to Karen Hudson, a grassroots activist deeply involved in the fight against industrial agriculture, not only has the "proliferation of large-scale corporate owned livestock factories displaced traditional family-owned farms at an alarming rate," but, she adds, "these factory farms generate massive amounts of waste from thousands of animals that are inhumanely raised with little or no space provided for normal movement."
Hudson is a family farmer, a factory farm consultant for the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) and the founder of F.A.R.M. (Families Against Rural Messes). In her travels around the country, Hudson spells out the consequences of unchecked industrial agriculture -- particularly focusing on hog farming.
When faced with state laws aimed at prohibiting the establishment of factory farms and protecting small family farms and the environment, agribusiness has successfully circumvented many of these measures. In 1988, for example, Halverson says South Dakota enacted an anti-corporate farming law in response to an effort by National Farms to establish a hog factory there. This law was then strengthened in 1998 through the passage of South Dakota's Constitutional Amendment E.
That didn't stop Bell Farms, LLP, a North Dakota limited liability partnership which owns hog factories in Colorado, and Sun Prairie, a Nebraska partnership. They came up with a tantalizing scheme to convince the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council to enter into a business relationship that would bring hog factories to the people of Rosebud Reservation. Rosebud Reservation is like many of our nation's Native American gulags -- isolated, desolate, overwhelmed by poverty, economically underdeveloped and rife with the social maladies of unemployment, alcoholism and shattered families. Against this reality, factory hog farming looked darn good.
But livestock operations threaten the environment, the food supply, the economy and the social structure in rural America. Hudson points out that a "typical hog livestock factory containing 10,000 hogs will create the waste volume equal to a city of 25,000 humans." And as might be expected, these factory farms are generally not forced to deal with the messes they are creating.
"Pollution shopping" is the term activists use to describe the corporate strategy agribusiness employs to skirt laws and take advantage of impoverished communities. The Rosebud Reservation deal is only one of many where a community is enticed by the promise of jobs and economic boom-times. What happens more frequently is that the community is left with an eco-disaster of vast proportions.
Factory farming investment projects are quickly becoming a two-way street. Halverson points out that hog factories owned by Japanese investors now operate in the United States (in Texas and Wyoming) and Dutch farmers are "escaping a crackdown in pollution in the Netherlands by setting up dairies in Indiana with several thousand cows each." In addition, the German Hanor Corp, the British Pig Improvement Corp. and Val, a Spanish company, rank among the top 50 pork production companies in the U.S.
Each month, a greater concentration of ownership takes place within the industry. According to Halverson, Smithfield's "domestic acquisition plans have drawn strong criticism from farm organizations and calls for the Justice Department to investigate their antitrust implications." She also notes that "continuing integration negatively influences the prices independent farmers receive for their hogs." In the end, whether in the United States, Poland or elsewhere, globalization and corporate concentration leave decimated small family farms in its wake.
Bill Berkowitz is the editor of CultureWatch, a monthly publication tracking the Religious Right and related conservative movements, published by Oakland's DataCenter.
Subscriptions are $35 a year. Contact him via phone: 510-835-4692, ext. 308, or by e-mail at culturewatch@datacenter.org.
For a free sample copy, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to: CultureWatch, 1904 Franklin St., Suite 900, Oakland, CA 94612.
c 2000 NewsForChange.com:
