Swine Flu: Smithfield Foods' statement vs. the ugly truth

American multinational CAFO Smithfield Foods this Sunday denied responsibility for the outbreak in Veracruz, Mexico, of swine flu, now an international public health emergency and currently classified as a Level 4 Pandemic ( sustained human-to-human transmission). Smithfield also states it is cooperating with government officials in the investigation:

Based on available recent information, Smithfield has no reason to believe that the virus is in any way connected to its operations in Mexico. The company also noted that its joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza.

The National Pork Producers Council reported today that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "people cannot get the hybrid influenza from eating pork or pork products" and "preliminary investigations have determined that none of the people infected with the hybrid flu had contact with hogs."

However, Smithfield's statement fails to mention that countless residents of La Gloria were routinely and relentlessly exposed to airborne droplets of pig feces and decayed tissue for an undetermined number of years, thanks to toxic and sick-making clouds blowing outward from Granja Carrol's so-called "oxidation ponds"--or pig sewage lagoons. And that they have long complained of respiratory illnesses, well before their children started dying in March.

Nor does the company's statement explain that contracting the H1N1 influenza virus does NOT necessarily require that one "have contact with hogs"; in fact, the flu virus is spread via tiny droplets of infected matter--feces, body fluids--that reach the mucous membranes and lungs when someone touches a contaminated surface before rubbing his eyes, for example, or when he unwittingly inhales airborne, virus-containing waste droplets floating around his town, courtesy of a nearby pig or poultry CAFO.

And there's something else--several things, actually--that Smithfield Foods left off its website: photographs of the Granjas Carrol plant itself. The photos are published on the news website Enlace Veracruz 212 (Veracruz Connection) - Analytical and Investigative Journalism. It must be said, these writer(s) and photographer(s) are very brave journalists indeed--for reasons both obvious and not-so-obvious: according to the accompanying article, speaking out against the Granjas Carrol operation has, disturbingly but not unsurprisingly, led to various residents being intimidated, threatened, and arrested by certain officials tasked with protecting the company's financial interests. (These images are, in a word, grisly, and the rest appear after the jump.  You've been warned.)

The infamous oxidation ponds, or pig-waste lagoons, filled with concentrated excrement, blood, and the rotting bodies of dead pigs; note the broken pipe.

Rotting pig carcass floating in the oxidation pond/pig-waste lagoon

Dead pigs, stacked on a wheeled cart and left out in the heat. It is not clear if these animals' bodies were destined for processing or disposal.

More dead pigs left out to rot; scavenger animals got hold of these carcasses. As the Enlace Veracruz writer notes, "This is the how Granjas Carrol cares for its dead."

So, readers, are you horrified yet? And are you, too, wondering where on Earth the American mainstream media are?

Also at litbrit.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Jesus, the shit moat is just horrifying. As are the carcasses.

And people wonder why American multinationals are hated throughout Latin America.

[Sara Anderson]

I once had a long conversation with a guy who wanted to make biodeisel from the "pig oil" he normally had to figure out a way to dispose of as a byproduct of his company's hog production.

[verplanck colvin]

While horrifying, and a great teaching moment for the truth of where our meat comes from, I don't see anything here yet that would link these conditions to the swine flu.

[BEN VIDGEN]

DECOMPOSING CORPSES AND POS WATER CONTAMINATION ARE SUPERB CONDITIONS FOR ANY DISEASE.

AS A FORMER RESEARCHER FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS ORGANISATION S.A.F.E. (1998) AND SOME ONE WELL VERSED IN BIO WARFARE (AS A JOURNALIST WHO SPECIALISIES IN SECURITY ISSUES FOR OVER 15 YEARS NOW)THESE PHOTO SHOCK ME.

PIGS BREED FOR MASS CONSUMPTION ARE USALLY FEED ON A DIET OF ANTIBIOTICS AND BOOSTER SHOOTS AND ARE TO PUT IT SIMPLY A TIME BOMB WAITING TO GO OFF ESPECIALLY IF THEIR CONDITIONS ARE NOT LOOKED AFTER WITH GREAT CARE AND DILIGENCE.

IT WOULD BE VERY INTERESTING TO KNOW WHICH VACCINES THESE PIGS HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO WHERE THEY WERE MADE AND WHERE THEY WERE PURCHASED FROM.

I RAISE THE POINT OF VACCINES AS THIS WOULD EXPLAIN THE AVIAN COMPONENT AS VIRUS USED FOR VACCINE PRODUCTION ARE OFTEN INCUBATORED IN EGGS. AN EXAMPLE OF THIS SWINE FOUND WITH AVIAN H1N1 AND WS33 (A MAN MADE ADAPTION OF THE 1918 INFLUENZA)IN KOREA IN 2004. THOUGH NEVER PROVEN THE FEELING WAS THAT THE SWINE HAD BEEN EXPOSED TO A LAB ERROR OF SOME KIND.

SUCH WAS THE STRENGHT OF THESE PHOTOS I MADE SURE MY COLLEGUES IN SYNDICATED RADIO AND MAJOR DAILYS WHERE AWARE OF THESE FARM.

I STRONGLY SUGGEST ANY ONE VIEWING THESE PHOTO'S PICK UP THEIR PHONE RIGHT NOW AND

1) CALL THE NEWS DESK
2) ASK FOR CHIEF REPORTER
3) ASK FOR THE CR EMAIL DETAILS AND SEND THEM THIS LINK DIRECTLY RIGH NOW!

BEN VIDGEN DEADLINE PUBLISHING LTD

[litbrit]

I don't see anything here yet that would link these conditions to the swine flu.

verplanck colvin, please read yesterday's post about how the influenza virus spreads, and how and where this particular outbreak started.

[Cathy]

Smithfield spokespeople are saying they have not seen any evidence of pigs infected with the flu, but what they are not saying out loud is the rest of the sentence: "because we have not inspected for the flu." It's their way of skillfully evading the truth without actual lying.

You see the photos of all the dead animals, and my thought is, "What did they die from? Are the dead ones inspected and the results reported?" The sick truth about CAFOs is that so many animals die of various illness that nobody is bothered enough by it to determine what killed them.

I have been told by my omnivorous friends that they have no intention of giving up any meat despite the connection between pig/poultry production and this flu, in effect saying that they do not care if their appetites cause the deaths of innocent babies ... it's a sad world. And I tell them they can expect the vegetarians to become more and more militant the longer we deal with animal feces (salmonella and e.coli) contaminating our sprouts, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, tahini, and peanut butter.

[MRKENNEDY]

Could this also be part of anatural plan to stop human beings from destroying nature? I will share this info with others, word of mouth spreads faster than viruses. And, yes, sometimes things are very sad and affect all of us negatively. Good thing there are people who are shifting their consciousness, otherwise we'd be worse off than this. If we wait too much longer to rise up and help, we will see how much worse it gets. Hugs from Alaska. And in the end I was searching for the truth tonight. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, right?

[Stephen]

Cathy,

I find it hard to believe that people will continue to stay friends with you after hearing lectures on how their eating habits result in dead babies. Especially since just a small dose of common sense would suggest that it's extremely unlikely that your friends are eating the mice, rats and birds which are actually responsible for the salmonella and e. coli contaminations about which you are so worried.

Sheesh, it's not like sprout and peanut butter plants are located in slaughterhouses, with one station butchering pigs next to a station stuffing raw alfalfa sprouts into bags.

The entire world could go vegetarian today without any effect whatsoever on the amount of contaminated plant-based food products. Again, and this is important, rats, mice and small wild birds such as pigeons or sparrows are simply not viewed as a food source in this or most other countries. Though perhaps you're suggesting that if the owners and workers of all our vermin-infested produce factories became vegetarians themselves, they'd be infused with so much righteousness that they'd stop cutting corners on cleanliness.

[litbrit]

Cathy: yes, yes, yes.

(And Stephen, you're wicked-funny, especially when you flex your formidable gallows humor muscles. Or rather, abbatoir humor muscles.)

[Cathy]

Stephen, I'm actually quite charming once you get to know me. ;)

It's all about the poop really. The waste from these huge farms is pumped into vast lagoons of poo. From there it is sprayed onto fields or other places. It seeps into the groundwater and/or droplets are blown around, contaminating everything in the vicinity. Did you know that pigs generate 3x as much crap as humans do? So you can imagine how much untreated sewage was festering in those ponds. The Pew Commission web site has some fascinating information if you care to learn about the problem.

How do YOU reconcile the statement from Smithfield that they've seen "no evidence" of flu in their herds... with all the dead pigs laying around on their farm? I'm unaware of any explanation Smithfield has offered for why those pigs died. Responsible farmers are dismayed when they have so many deaths of their herd and take measures to keep them healthy. But CAFOs are not responsible farmers, that much should be clear to any casual observer.

You might also be aware that although Smithfield says they immunize their pigs from the flu... the CDC says there IS no immunization to protect against this particular flu. If this did originate in the pigs (and we don't know for sure, probably never will), whatever immunizations that were given to the herd would have done nothing against it.

::things that make you go... hmmm::
Sorry to 'jack your blog Deborah, but sometimes the ignorance has to be addressed. ;)

[Stephen]

How do YOU reconcile the statement from Smithfield that they've seen "no evidence" of flu in their herds... with all the dead pigs laying around on their farm?

I don't, because there is no reconciliation. I'm on your side, at least until you start making accusations that can't be backed up by evidence.

I'm against CAFOs, just like I'm against huge produce farms that indiscriminately spray pesticides, herbicides and antifungals on their vast acreages of monocrops - chemicals that also manage to find their way into water supplies. I'm against huge processing plants that don't follow basic sanitation guidelines, and I'm against gutting the regulatory regime that's absolutely necessary for keeping our food supply safe. I'm against the outsourcing of our food production to dictatorships that exploit workers and have even less regulation - and less enforcement of the regulations they do have - than we do.

In every single way, I'm with you, except one. And that is I refuse to conflate problems, to blur lines and to make unfounded accusations. Pork CAFOs are very likely to blame for the current swine flu problem. And SARS & avian flu are very likely the result of the incredibly lax standards for food production in Guangdong province and its proximity to Hong Kong and, therefore, the rest of the world.

But CAFOs are not responsible for salmonella poisoning in produce, and it's ridiculous - and counterproductive - to suggest otherwise. Seriously, if you want to talk about "ignorance," thinking that a pig CAFO in Mexico is responsible for tainted pistachios in California is a good example of that.

There is nothing wrong with eating meat or animal products or with refusing to do the same. And I happen to think that what progressives of all dietary stripes need to do is band together to reform our food system so that it is clean, safe and humane. For every animal that's mistreated there's a person being mistreated in a produce operation, and slaughterhouses, while gorier, are not really that much dirtier than produce factories. We need to fix the whole system instead of trying to establish just who is more righteous.

[Cathy]

You are right, we need to clean up the whole system.

BUT- veggies to not generate e. coli or salmonella. Those things come mainly from cows and poultry. Further, we agree that CAFOs are unsanitary and pump out massive amounts of fecal waste, which contaminates the air and groundwater. So it's not a stretch to say that the likely source of e. coli in spinach or salmonella in tomatoes... is from such farms. It is a stretch in my opinion to blame wild animals and ignore the obvious.

While vegetable processing plants might not be cleaner than slaughterhouses in one sense, the types of germs that are hosted in slaughterhouses are a much bigger biohazard than what you find in a tomato packing plant, in terms of diseases that jump from say, cucumbers, to humans.

Please understand, this is not a matter of being self-righteous - it's simple economics. The meat industry is a consumer-driven entity. If people would stop consuming so much factory farmed meat, these places would go out of business and ethical farming would have a fighting chance. I don't think it's inherently wrong to eat meat. I think it's irresponsible to consume meat that is produced like that, as if the most important thing in the world is my belly. That is (among other reasons) why I boycott the whole shebang... not because I'm self-righteous.

I'm totally with you on the chemicals used in agriculture. We grow as much of our own food as possible. GMO vegetables scare the hell out of me too. =:O

[Stephen]

Cathy, this is ridiculous. We know that rats and wild birds have been the source of contamination in produce factories. We know it. It's not up for debate or speculation.

Further, salmonella and e. coli occur everywhere, all the time, and only basic sanitation is required to keep them in check - basic sanitation that needs to be applied in all food handling settings, from animal production facilities to farms to restaurants. Blaming cows and pigs for these bacteria simply isn't going to solve the problem.

And if feedlots are the source of all food-borne illness, which is what you're implying, why are there more outbreaks of salmonella happening in produce than in meat? Once again, common sense comes to the rescue: obviously peanut butter, pistachios, spinach and sprouts are getting contaminated by something other than feedlots which are usually hundreds of miles away from the farms which grow them and factories which process and package them.

As for ethical farming, unless you get all your food products from small, local farms - and I mean all of it, then you're contributing to the problem just as much as someone who eats meat. Genetically modified, pesticide-drenched monocrops are just as bad for the environment and economy as hamburger. Do you think your soybeans products aren't made from GMO soybeans grown in vast swaths of Iowa? Is your seitan really not made from wheat that has completely wrecked the Great Plains ecosystems from North Dakota all the way to Kansas? If you really cared for the whole system like you say, you wouldn't waste everyone's time calling meat-eaters "baby killers" and trying to implicate CAFOs with no evidence whatsoever.

[stella]

First time I've visited this blog, but thank you for publishing these photos, and to the Mexican journalists who took risks to get them. I have put your link on my twitter page, not sure what else I can do.

This is really beginning to remind me of the BSE scandal in the UK back in the 90s

[litbrit]

Thank you, Stella. (As an ex-pat, I am torn between feeling homesick upon seeing the abbreviation "UK" invoked and being glad to have missed out on being worried sick for my meat-eating friends.)

[Uncle B]

Manure ponds and offal - perfect for stewing into bio-gas, and high quality fertilizer from the sludge and selling! These stupid businessmen are wasting a resource flow, they can't possibly be American Vulture Capitalists, who never never leave money on the table, not ever. Fvuk them, they'll go broke to the first Chinese corporation that turns all resource flows into coins! No goddamn wonder American capital fled the domestic market and headed east to Shanghai. "What a stupid bunch of morons", as bugs bunny says. China even has a Chev "Volt" knock-off, on the streets of Shanghai running as taxis today, and Yankee Doodle's Great and Powerful GM can't get their vaporware volt off of the desktop! Watch the Capital flight to the Asians this causes. Knee - deep in pig shit and praying for gasoline is where the Yankee Doodle Corporate world is, and that's a fact born out by this article,complete with photos of resource flow = cash wasted, and dumb bastards rule the world? Not for long, get out your commie flags and phrase books you're gonna need them.

[Fartacus]

"I'm against the outsourcing of our food production to dictatorships that exploit workers and have even less regulation - and less enforcement of the regulations they do have - than we do."

Are you also against the massive US corporate farms who bribe, coerce and manipulate government officials in these "dictatorships" in exchange for limited to nonexistent regulation, then buy US politicians for the same purpose when importing their rancid products? What about mainstream media outlets who swallow Smithfield's PR statements whole without investigation? A search of CNN for "flu + Smithfield" yielded two results, both of which included a brief dismissive statement: "His mother blamed a huge pig farm in the neighborhood for the virus. Officials have conducted tests at the farm owned by U.S. company Smithfield Foods, and those tests came back negative." Well, as long as "Officials" are on the job...they're conducting unspecified tests! Before we start blaming everything on corrupt foreign dictatorships, let's remember NAFTA, the great enabler of corrupt foreign dictatorships and facilitator of corrupt and undue corporate influence and exploitation. The people of Mexico have a lot in common with the general public in the US. Both countries have seen elections stolen, the public will disenfranchised. Both are burdened with oppressive governments beholden to the corporate bottom line.

[Stephen]

Are you also against the massive US corporate farms who bribe, coerce and manipulate government officials in these "dictatorships" in exchange for limited to nonexistent regulation. . .

No, I'm not against that, because it certainly isn't just repeating the very point that I made or anything. Clearly it's impossible to look at what I wrote and derive any sense of where I would stand on the issues in your comment. Maybe I shouldn't be so very ambiguous with what I write.

Or perhaps I'm just being incredibly sarcastic because that's my normal response to someone who criticizes me for agreeing with them.

[Robert F. Kennedy]

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ON SMITHFIELD FOODS CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR:

I am President of Waterkeeper Alliance an environmental group and a leader of a national coalition of family farmers, fishermen, environmental and animal welfare organizations, religious and civic associations, and food safety advocates who are fighting Smithfield Foods in the United States. During the past eighteen months, I have come to Poland twice to alert the Polish people about the dangers of allowing Smithfield a foothold in this country, most recently at the request of the Animal Welfare Institute.

Smithfield is one of a handful of large multinationals who are transforming global meat production from a traditional farm enterprise to factory style industrial production. Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world and controls almost 30% of the U.S. pork market. Smithfield’s style of industrial pork production is now a major source of air pollution and probably the largest source of water pollution in America. Smithfield and its cronies have driven tens of thousands of family farmers off the land, shattered rural communities, poisoned thousands of miles of American waterways, killed billions of fish, put thousands of fishermen out of work, sickened rural residents and treated hundreds of millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.

Four years ago, in 1999, Smithfield began buying slaughterhouses and state farms in Poland. On July 22nd of this year, I sat in the crowded Senate Conference Room in the Polish Republic’s Senate Building in Warsaw listening as Smithfield’s Vice President Gregg Schmidt promised the senate agricultural committee that Smithfield will “modernize” Polish agriculture and bring prosperity and jobs to rural communities.

For the past two decades, Smithfield Foods and its allies have made identical promises to the people of North Carolina, one of America’s rural states. After listening to these promises, the state Senate passed laws to make it much easier for Smithfield to do business in North Carolina.

With encouragement from these politicians, Smithfield built the largest slaughterhouse in the world in Bladen County North Carolina. The plant butchers 30,000 pigs each day. By building this pig slaughter plant, Smithfield set off explosive growth of a new way of producing hogs in North Carolina -- factory-style production.

Factory Farms

Although Smithfield, a Virginia-based meat packer, never before owned a farm, its CEO, Joe Luter, began buying up farms so that the company could control, as he likes to boast, all aspects of pork production “from piglets to pork chops.” Luter who describes himself as “a tough man in a tough business” lives in a $17 million Park Avenue mansion in New York. He is known for a ruthless style that maximizes profits by industrializing agriculture and eliminating both animal husbandry and the family farm.

Smithfield builds football field-sized warehouses in which the company crams thousands of genetically manipulated hogs into tiny metal boxes where they are deprived of sunlight, exercise, straw bedding, rooting, and social opportunities. A hog is as smart and sensitive as a dog. Under these crowded stressful conditions, they must be kept alive by constant doses of antibiotics, and heavy metals. Antibiotic resistant bacteria and residues of these additives naturally end up in their waste.

Industrial Style Pollution

Since a hog produces ten times the amount of waste as a human, a single hog factory can generate more fecal waste than Warsaw. One of Smithfield’s factories in Utah houses 850,000 hogs and produces more fecal waste than New York City’s 8.5 million people. Hog waste falls through slatted floors into a basement where it is periodically flushed into giant outdoor pits called lagoons. While cities must treat sewage before discharging it, Smithfield’s meat factories dump their liquid manure untreated onto fields which quickly become saturated. The manure then percolates into groundwater or is carried by rain into nearby streams or lakes. Waste from industrial pork factories contains a witch’s brew of nearly 400 dangerous substances, including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, deadly biocides, pesticides, and dozens of disease-causing viruses and microbes. Antibiotic residues in this lethal soup foster the growth of deadly “super bugs” -- disease organisms that are immune to human antibiotics.

Polluted Water Supplies

Millions of tons of fecal stew produced by the meat factories has poisoned groundwaters in 34 states with deadly nitrates that can kill infants and cause severe mental retardation in children. Disease epidemics caused by meat factories have sickened and killed thousands of Americans. In 1993, for example, a meat operation's microbes were suspected to have tainted a water supply sickened 400,000 people in Milwaukee (half the population!) and killed 114 individuals.

Sick Rivers

Fifteen years ago, the state of North Carolina had some of the purest waters in the United States. Today, it has some of the most polluted waters. A spill from one hog lagoon killed one billion fish in the Neuse River in 1995. North Carolina had to use bulldozers to plow the fish onto the shores of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. Today, as a result of Smithfield’s invasion in North Carolina, hog industry pollution has poisoned the Neuse so badly that a hundred million fish die every year die in that river.

Pfiesteria; the “Cell from Hell”

Hog factory contaminants have also fostered outbreaks of a previously unknown microbe, Pfiesteria piscicida, in America’s coastal waters. Pfiesteria, kills billions of fish and causes open sores that won’t heal, severe respiratory illness and brain damage in humans who handle fish or swim in the water. Pustulating sores cover the bodies of fishermen from the Neuse River. Some of them have trouble recalling basic information like the route home due to brain damage from Pfiesteria. Pfiesteria has appeared in Maryland where my sister, until recently, was Lieutenant Governor. The state had to close the famous rivers of the Chesapeake Bay to protect public health.

Bad Odors

Hog factory stenches defy description. Neighboring farmers choke, vomit and faint from the fetid gases as they ride their tractors or work their fields. The smell cannot be removed from skin or clothing -- even with the strongest soap. Food eaten even a mile downwind of a hog factory can take on the odor and flavor of hog waste. Neighbors can no longer sit on their porches in the summer, open their windows, hang their laundry or enjoy their meals. Factory odors can be so strong that they nauseate people flying in airplanes as high as 3,000 feet above these facilities!

Dangerous Gases

The fumes inside hog buildings are so strong that when the twenty-four hour ventilation systems fail, all pigs inside quickly die from asphyxiation. Hydrogen sulfide, methane and ammonia gases emanating from these factories also harm human health. Numerous studies show that factory farm workers and downwind neighbors contract lung disease, nausea, eye infections, nosebleeds, gastro intestinal illness, depression and even brain damage. Every year, hog factory workers become seriously ill and die from deadly gases emanating from liquid manure pits.

Recent scientific papers by the U.S. government indicate that toxic air discharges from hog factories are so poisonous that they violate the federal health and environmental laws and endanger the health of neighbors. One study shows that millions of antibiotic resistant bacteria move by air from hog factories every day, threatening public health and neighboring herds. Another study shows that some meat factories emit seven times the particulate matter allowed under American Clear Air laws. Particulates can cause asthma attacks.

The End of the American Family Farm

Each hog factory puts ten family farmers out of business, replacing high quality agricultural jobs with three or four hourly wage workers in degrading jobs that are among the lowest paying and most dangerous in America. Because animals are given almost no husbandry, as few as two workers may tend a factory of 10,000 hogs! Conditions are so miserable that employees seldom endure these jobs more than a few months. Major slaughterhouses, including Smithfield’s, have a 100 % annual turnover rate of its employees.

The situation in North Carolina, America’s second largest hog producer, is typical. Two decades ago there were 27,000 family hog farmers in North Carolina. Today, there are almost none. North Carolina’s hog farmers have been replaced by 2,200 hog factories; 1,600 owned or indentured to a single multinational -- Smithfield Foods. Smithfield now controls 75% of hog production in the state. From North Carolina, Smithfield moved to Iowa, the number one hog producing state. As a result of factory farms, Iowa lost 45,000 independent hog farmers in recent years with half of the remaining 10,000 already controlled by Smithfield and a few other large corporations. Joe Luter told the Washington Post that Smithfield will turn “Poland into the Iowa of Europe.”

Contract Farmers; How to Become a Serf on Your Own Land

As I listened, Mr. Schmidt told the Polish Senate that Smithfield would bring employment to Polish farmers by giving them contracts to produce hogs. I can tell you that any farmer who signs a contract with Smithfield will become a serf on his own land. Here’s how Smithfield took over the family farms in America.

Smithfield signed a few contracts with large producers to produce tens of thousands of hogs for its slaughterhouse. Then it swallowed those producers who had to take Smithfield’s price for their farms because they had nowhere else to slaughter their hogs. Once Smithfield owned these large farms the company began overproducing hogs so that the price of pork dropped from 60 cents per pound to 8 cents per pound. Since it costs 36 cents per pound for a farmer to raise a pig, most pig farmers had to go out of business except the ones that Smithfield signed contracts with. The contracts are never negotiated. The desperate farmers will sign the contract the way Smithfield writes it.

Typically the contract requires the farmer to use his farm for security and borrow approximately $200,000 to build a warehouse according to Smithfield’s specifications. The company promises him approximately $20,000 per year. The farmer owns the warehouse and pays the insurance and interest to the bank. Under the contract, Smithfield owns the feed and the pigs, but the farmer owns the manure. Smithfield does not pay him enough to legally dispose of the manure. That’s his problem and soon it will be the problem of his community as he pollutes the air and water with the excess manure.

Smithfield’s contract is typically good for only one-year even though it’s going to take the farmer twenty years to pay off the mortgage. When it is in Smithfield’s interest to buy more land, the company has the power to make future contracts so burdensome that the farmer goes bankrupt. Smithfield can then buy his hog house and land from the bank for pennies on the dollar. Since the farm is valueless without a Smithfield contract, there are no other bidders. It was in this way that Smithfield came to control pork production in North Carolina. The company is already using the same practices in Poland. Any farmer who signs such a contract will be a slave on his own farm.

Now when the price of pork drops to 8 cents per pound, Smithfield continues to make money because the price the consumer pays for bacon at the grocery store stays the same. Since Smithfield owns the slaughterhouse, it can still make money while it squeezes the farmer until it has a monopoly or farm production. This is one of the reasons that the United States Senate today is considering national legislation, and many states as well, that will ban the ownership of farms by slaughterhouses. Smithfield’s “integration” system puts the farmer at a catastrophic disadvantage.

Economic Impacts

There are many studies that show that factory farms have a devastating impact on rural economies and quality of life. There is not a single empirical study showing net benefits to rural communities. Studies show that property values in counties hosting pork factories fall, on average by 30%. If you drive through America’s rural communities, you will see bankrupted hardware and feed stores (factory farms don’t buy locally) boarded up main streets and closed banks, churches and schools. America’s heartland and historic landscapes are being emptied of rural Americans and occupied by large corporations.

Political Corruption

Hog factories produce far more manure than is needed to fertilize fields around them. The costs of properly treating and disposing this waste would make meat factories uncompetitive with traditional farms unless they violate numerous environmental laws. Traditional farms are exempt from these laws since manure, for them, is not waste product but a valuable fertilizer spread on fields to grow crops. Because factory meat producers must break the law in order to survive, the industry’s business plan relies on the assumption that pork factories will be able to evade prosecution by improperly influencing government enforcement officials.

Smithfield uses its wealth to buy politicians, paralyze regulatory agencies and break health and environmental laws with impunity. In North Carolina, Smithfield made business partnerships with a powerful state senator Wendell Murphy and a powerful United States Senator Launch Faircloth who protected the company’s interests in local and federal legislatures. Using adept campaign contributions and such cunning alliances, the hog industry has been able to corrupt and control the North Carolina state senate. The state’s largest newspaper, Raleigh News and Observer, won the Pulitzer Prize for its five-part investigative report disclosing how the factory hog industry had captured and corrupted the state senate.

Politicians who oppose the hog barons are punished. When North Carolina’s Duplin County State Assemblywoman Cynthia Watson began speaking out against Smithfield’s impact on her farm community, the hog industry launched a savage multimillion dollar attack, spending as much as $10,000 a week for two years to destroy her reputation. As a result, she lost her election and the hog barons sent a message to all the senators in North Carolina that if you speak out against this industry or this company, we will punish you!

Citizens who protest get the same treatment. Typically, the industry launches its occupation by removing the democratic rights of local communities who refuse to site these facilities in their communities. In Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states and Canadian provinces, public officials have stripped local governments of their decision making powers over these facilities. Similarly, we have seen that in Poland, local officials who opposed Smithfield’s facilities have been overruled by national authorities. The industry routinely uses bullying lawyers and illegal intimidation, threats, harassment, and violence to terrorize and silence its critics including its own workers. A group of Nebraska citizens who made comments during a public hearing on a hog factory permit were sued by Nebraska’s largest livestock producer. Neighboring farmers are routinely sued for participating in public hearings or speaking out against the hog industry. Contempt for our laws and bullying are part of industry culture.

Criminal Behavior

Smithfield’s own records show that it has committed tens of thousands of violations of state and federal environmental laws. Indeed, recent court decisions indicate that hundreds of Smithfield’s facilities around the country are in almost daily violation of federal environmental laws. In 1997, a federal judge ordered Smithfield to pay $12 million dollars, one of the largest Clean Water Act penalties in history. The court determined that a single Smithfield plant had violated the Clean Water Act over 6,000 times and that company officials had intentionally lied to federal regulators to cover up its violations. In 2000, a National Labor Relations Judge found Smithfield guilty of serious labor law violations. The judge found that that Smithfield managers conspired with local police to physically intimidate and assault union supporters. He also found that Smithfield attorneys suborned perjury and that company witnesses lied under oath. Again in 2002, Smithfield was found guilty of significant labor law violations, this time by a federal court, which ordered the company to pay $755,000 in damages to workers who the company had wrongfully imprisoned.

Smithfield Invades Poland

In 1999, Smithfield announced its plans to move into Poland and began purchasing slaughterhouses that year. Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), one of our allies in the battle against Smithfield, brought a delegation of Poles over to tour the farm landscapes of America to see what they were in for. AWI took the Poles to Missouri where you can drive 50 kilometers without leaving company land and then to Duplin County North Carolina where they were enveloped in an unbearable stench. During this trip, one lady in North Carolina , Mrs. Carr, pleaded with the visiting Poles, “I’ve never been to Poland but for God’s sake don’t let them do to you what they’ve done to us.” The Polish delegation promised that this would never happen in Poland. Unfortunately it is happening now. Just as Smithfield used North Carolina to launch its takeover of American pork production in 1980, Poland is Smithfield’s platform for launching its bid for monopoly control of pork production in Europe.

In 1999, Smithfield purchased Animex, the state owned conglomerate of giant communist era farms and nine slaughterhouses that export Polish sausage and ham to the United States. The deal was a bargain, Luter paid only $55 million just after Animex, at state expense, made extensive renovations. For example, the government’s Constar plant brought ultra modern equipment from the U.S. just before the Smithfield takeover. Estimated value of the company following these improvements was $500 million. Luter boasted that he paid, “only 10 cents on the dollar.”

Gaining monopoly control of the country’s slaughterhouse capacity is more difficult in Poland because there are over 4,000 slaughterhouses in this country. Smithfield’s strategy was to get the government to do its dirty work by closing down the competition.

At Smithfield’s request, the Polish government began closing hundreds of small slaughterhouses after Joe Luter had a three-hour meeting with President Buzek. Buzek's Minister of Agriculture promulgated regulations that would put up to 50% of Poland’s slaughterhouses out of business. The government justified these new rules under the fraudulent pretense that small slaughterhouses must be shut down to comply with the EU regulations. However, EU regulations clearly state that small slaughterhouses may be kept open to serve regional markets. In fact, Germany, France and Sweden fought to keep their small slaughterhouse and milk plants open and even subsidize them knowing that those are the core of local markets and food distribution. Once the small slaughterhouses disappear, local markets quickly follow.

Furthermore, large high tech slaughterhouses do no make a safer food supply. In the U.S. and in England, the closure of small slaughterhouses actually coincided with an increase of meat borne disease by 300% and 500% respectively. This is because large centralized slaughterhouses force pork production onto factory farms where disease is rampant and because of long transport distances stress the animals and spread disease. Furthermore, technologies that increase line speed inside the slaughterhouse multiply worker errors and make proper inspections impossible. (Now the big slaughterhouses are insisting on the controversial technology of irradiation in order to solve their problems of diseases vectors.)

The Polish government took a number of other steps to facilitate Smithfield’s takeover of Polish agriculture. For example, the government legalized liquid manure and tried to dismantle the Animal Welfare Act. The government allowed Smithfield to buy and lease farms in Poland despite official policies forbidding foreigners to purchase agricultural land. In addition, the government gave large pork export subsides to Smithfield amounting to 55 cents per kilo. These subsidies are intended to benefit Polish farmers but since Smithfield imports both its pigs and the feed, there is not much benefit to Poland.

With this help, Smithfield has converted as many as thirty-five state farms to hog factories. One of these, in Nielep, West Pomerania, already houses 30,000 hogs. To circumvent Polish laws, some of these are owned by front companies wholly owned by Smithfield. Typically Smithfield has only one of several directors in each but the company charter requires unanimous votes. Prima Farms, for example, is officially owned by two Poles but every important decision must be signed by Mr. Griffith of Smithfield. In this way, Smithfield can capture subsidies from the EU intended for Polish farmers.

Polish agriculture

In mid-July, I spent a week touring the agricultural areas of northern Poland. I learned that you have in Poland something that we’ve lost in the United States and something we miss very much. Poland is an oasis of traditional farming in a world dominated by agribusiness multinationals. Poland has over two million farmers -- as many as the half of Europe put together. About 18% of Poland’s population are farmers or farm families. We passed through picturesque farm villages where the farms averaged five hectares with modest homes of wood, timber and fieldstone. Each farmer has a horse, two cows, some pigs, and some chickens. Animals are raised on the free range, humanely and have lives of dignity.

In Poland, you don’t see the vast monocultures of row crops that we are now accustomed to in the United States. Polish farmers rotate a variety of crops, in the traditional way that fosters healthy soils. I was thrilled that many farmhouses had occupied stork nests on their roofs. Poland hosts 25% of Europe’s white stork population -- 50,000 pairs -- more than any other country in Europe. The white stork has been exterminated by modern agriculture practices elsewhere in Europe; liquid manure and pesticides effectively extinguished fish, frogs, crabs and many insects that the storks eat. In Denmark, there are only six pairs left.

Poland has large stands of timber and Europe’s last clean flowing rivers. Poland has purer soils than anywhere else in Europe. Its land is uncontaminated by pesticide and fertilizer residue and an astounding 97% of its soils according to Professor Andrzej Mocek, Dean of the faculty of agronomy, in Poznan, is uncontaminated by metals which is the artifact of industrial smokestack pollution throughout the rest of Europe.

Polish Foods

One morning, we ate breakfast with the Kornilo - Jarzyna family at their farm near the village of Nowodwory. Agro-tourism is a growing business in Poland, where farmers take in tourists who come to fish, hike, pick berries, or just eat great food. Great slabs of traditional Polish sausage and meats, open jugs of homemade honey of acacia or linden smothered our breakfast table. We slapped pork fat onto plum rolls like butter and ate pierogis filled with buckwheat, homemade cheese, mint, and sweetened with berries and spices. My favorite was bigos stew which Polish hunters invented by adding various meats to a perpetual pot of boiling cabbage -- delicious! This farm family makes their own butter and cans their own jelly. The house is surrounded by hives, orchards of cherries, apples, pears, and plums with understories of black currants, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. I was full as a tick! It’s no wonder that people from Lublin and Warsaw and all over Europe come here to indulge in chemical free foods with real farm flavor.

I thought about the poor taste of food in the United States where there has been a dramatic decline in meat quality due to factory farming of pigs and poultry. Many American chefs, food writers and home-cooks have entirely abandoned cooking pork raised by industrial meat companies like Smithfield because they find it dry and flavorless. These deficiencies are apparently due to the manner in which confinement pork is bred and raised.

Millions of years of natural selection have endowed hogs with back fat to regulate body temperature. But Smithfield gets more money from meat than from fat so the company has bred its own strain of super-lean pigs born with almost no back fat. They are high strung and unable to survive normal outside temperatures.

According to food professionals, this extreme leanness has dramatically diminished the eating quality of American pork. An article in the April / May Saveur magazine describes the pigs of modern confinement agriculture as being so skinny that they looked "like dachshunds." And an article in the May 4, 2003 New York Times Magazine applauded the old breeds and traditional farming methods of the kind used in Poland pointing out that “the pork industry has managed to engineer a pig with almost no fat at all. And this is why most modern recipes for pork involve some kind of liquid -- putting the meat in a marinade before cooking, basting it while cooking or braising it in broth. If you simply grill a mass-market pork chop, it becomes inedibly dry.” The Times then observes that free-range pork, in contrast, “is rich when sliced and sautéed, fine textured and robust in flavor. It needs nothing more than seasoning with salt.”

The dryness and poor taste of confinement pork have gotten so bad that many major pork companies are now "enhancing" their pork -- adding water, flavored liquids, or even stock to their tray-pack and prepared meats and using red food coloring to improve its drab appearance.

North Carolina Comes to Poland

Smithfield is already putting its trademark on Polish farms and rural communities. On July 19th, I visited the town of Wieckowice, a beautiful village with shrines and wooden and brick homes with tile roofs and long barns of brick and stone.

We ran across several dozen local activists carrying signs outside a former state farm owned by Animex where Smithfield reportedly houses 17,000 hogs. The facility has permits for only 500 cows and 500 hogs. Governor Nowakowski of Poznan told me that all the local citizens are adamantly opposed to Smithfield Foods and that he refused to give the company permits when it bought the farm two years ago. But 6 months later the environmental ministry overrode him. The Animex farm is 40 yards from an elementary school where, according to the residents, children get sick and vomit from the hog odors. Among the protestors was a dignified woman, Irena Kowalak, who served as village mayor for 35 years. She told us she had resigned recently because of intimidation by Smithfield.

Thanks to the governor, Smithfield is not able to get permits for liquid manure, so the farm uses straw bedding and has not yet devised a plan for disposing of its waste. Fields of wheat surround the hog barns but they are never harvested since Smithfield is not interested in agriculture. To Smithfield, these fields are a place to dump the notorious wastes of industrial meat production. A convoy of indignant Wieckowice residents drove me out to see the giant pile of hog manure. On the side of a 1,000 acre wheat field, I saw a mountain of hog waste 150 meters long, 12 feet high and 50 meters wide. “Seventeen thousand hogs for 6 months,” a young man said nodding at the pile. Local authorities have been ordering Smithfield to move the illegal pile for six months, but the company has refused. The night before my visit, Smithfield covered its pile with a giant black tarp, which was already inflated and writhing with the internal pressure of methane gas.

Six hundred meters downhill from the pile, villagers had created a public beach on a 1,500 acre lake where umbrellas shaded dozens of families swimming and playing on a steamy 90ş day. Manure residues fester on the shores of a nearby embayment into which Smithfield’s waste pile drains. An old man with twinkling blue eyes sticks his hand into the water, smells his fingers and offers us a whiff. “Smithfield Foods!” he says.

Governor Nowakowski told us that another Smithfield factory in Sedziny with 4,500 hogs only has a permit for 1,000 cows. The governor said his assistants were now inspecting the facility. “But,” he said, “the legislation is very difficult for the local government to enforce [without support of the state].” Unfortunately, the federal government is not supporting him. He is not the only local politician begging for federal help. Zofia Wilczynska, a member of Parliament, has complained to the government that a Smithfield operation in Polczyn Zdroj is endangering the village’s 400-year old health spa. Another health spa in Goldap is also threatened by pollution from a Smithfield facility.

The following day, I met with the deputy of the agriculture committee of Parliament who told us that the agricultural ministry has recently conducted an investigation of sixteen Smithfield farms -- fourteen owned by Smithfield and two farms owned by front groups controlled by Smithfield -- and found that all Poland’s veterinary and health laws and construction standards had been broken at every one. Even when Smithfield lacks proper permits or breaks the law, the company gets laughable fines of a few hundred dollars for their lawbreaking.

Not all local officials are opposed to Smithfield’s operations. One hundred sixty kilometers north of Wieckowice in western Pomerania, the mayor of another village, Wierzchowo, gave Smithfield permits for two enormous farms after Smithfield paid his wife approximately $4,000 to perform the Environmental Impact Assessment for the company.

We witnessed firsthand not only Smithfield’s lawbreaking but the economic impacts of its production methods on local communities and markets. When Smithfield took over Animex, the company's three principal farms in northeastern Poland, near Goldap, employed sixty workers. Now, following the farms' conversion to automated hog factories, only seven workers remain.

Smithfield says it wants to produce six million pigs per year in Poland. Polish peasants now produce 20 million pigs per year and a quarter of them will have to lose their jobs to make way for Smithfield. Smithfield is already squeezing the small farms. In Pomerania, we found that the small slaughterhouses had already been closed and that the remaining slaughterhouse, which was owned by Smithfield, would not slaughter hogs from the small farms. The rest of Poland will soon follow. Once Smithfield controls the slaughterhouses and has eliminated local markets from farmers, it will be able to control prices and it will soon control the farms.

The Tyranny of Monopoly Capitalism

When I told Polish audiences about Smithfield’s behavior in the Unites States, Poles were absolutely astounded that an American company could behave so badly. There is such an enduring faith in America and American capitalism and such a hunger for capital investment in a nation left behind after the second world war when the rest of Europe was feasting on the Marshall Plan, German reparations and free market capitalism. The Polish people’s love for America and faith in our system made me doubly determined not to allow Smithfield to take advantage of them.

POLES, DEFEND YOUR PIGS, DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY! (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland October, 2003)

[Dr. Helen McCaffrey]

Because the Obama administration has chosen to put POLITICS before SCIENCE and not follow sound epidemiological practice, by containing the source of the epidemic by for example CLOSING THE SOUTHERN BORDER, millions of innocent animals are slaughtered and hundreds of Americans are sick and small farmers are ruined.

Stop being political, Mr.Obama Keep your own word FOLLOW THE SCIENCE.
Stop pandering to Big Ag, Big labor and Big illegal workers

[Sir Charles]

Yea, keep talking wingnut. And turn off the fucking caps lock you "moran."

[Stephen]

No, Charles, it makes perfect sense to close a border that's thousands of miles long in mostly inhospitable landscape. We can use all the soldiers we've got just sitting around, not doing anything in Iraq or Afghanistan. And if we put each one on a winged unicorn, they can patrol just that much more.

[Kevin]

Does anyone remember this story from last February about Quality Pork Producers in Minnesota and a mystery illness?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05pork.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=minnesota%20meat%20packing%20plant&st=cse

[Redtopt]

OK - here's what a lot of American's don't realize. The reason many companies move to countries like Mexico, as Smithfields has done?

The EPA! Period!!

Mexico doesn't have the same pollution regulations (not even close) to those enacted and enforced in the US. Ask any person who lives near the border with Mexico if they would drink the groundwater?

My mother used to live in McAllen Texas, a small town near Brownsville, which is just across the border from Matamoros, Mexico. Government and water management agencies in south Texas stay in a constant state of emergency because the ground water in So Texas is almost completely undrinkable. This is due to the pollutions and high level of toxins leaching into in from the Mexico side of the Rio Grande River. In all the times I’ve visited south Texas, not one person I met there drinks water from the tap, cooks with water from the tap,..

This article is a party line publicity response to a public relations nightmare. They might be able to say their pigs aren’t testing positive for Swine Flu today, but what about those butchered a couple months ago, whose fecal matter and various biologicals were probably allowed to drain into the river. The same river that leads to the town of La Gloria, which appears to be ground zero for the first swine flu case? (I don’t believe in coincidences.)

Is the product Smithfield brings in from Mexico suspect, probably not. Will I be buying their products again? Probably not anytime in the near future as I personally will be boycotting their products until someone besides an (easily purchased) official in Mexico offers some proof of where it did start if not in La Gloria.

[Deigh Covey]

To Kevin re: Post on May 2, 2009 at 12:33 a.m.

I read that New York Times article you mentioned in your post about the mysterious illnesses that appeared in Minnesota at factory pig farms. It reminded me of a recent New York Times article Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health that appeared on March 11, 2009 in the OP-ED section written by Nicholas D. Kristof,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12kristof.html?scp=1&sq=Our%20pigs,%20our%20food%20our%20health&st=cse

In his article Kristof reports that a doctor in Indiana found that several of his patients came down with strange rashes, and when tested they were positive for MRSA, or staph infection resistant to antibiotics. Kristof also reports that the doctor was going to go on record regarding his suspicions about the hog farms located outside of the town where he lived, and the outbreak of MRSA. But the doctor died. Kristof concludes that a blood test suggested the doctor had a heart attack or aneurysm: the doctor had suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation.

You may already know that thousands of factory farms produce a majority of the meat, as well as eggs and dairy products (as well as produce) to supermarkets. Factory farms provide this meat by producing a year-round supply of animal feed at a cheap price intended to boost productivity of the animals to keep up with consumer demand. This cheap feed typically includes genetically modified corn and soy grains, and can also legally include “by-products” such as municipal garbage-just use your imagination, stale breads and candy. And did someone say that pork meat was safe to eat? The genetically modified corn and soy fed to factory farmed animals is harvested from crops that are treated with fossil-fuel based fertilizers, and sprayed with pesticides.

Diseases spread quickly between animals confined in unnaturally, tight, overcrowded filthy factory farm facilities. These diseases are treated with several rounds of chemical additives, and constant doses of antibiotics. Growth hormones are given to the animals to increase their growth which leads to joint problems as the animals can barely stand up, all in the name of boosting meat production to for.... consumer demand.

The overuse of antibiotics and drugs make factory farms a breeding grounds for several diseases. While these factories also are an Abu Agrabe of animal abuse, they pollute the ground and water beyond comprehension as underscored in the photographs posted on this blog. It is no surprise that we’re now reading several reports about a variety of diseases that appear simultaneously throughout the world in people who work or live in close proximity to factory farms.

According to the Lithuanian Food Fair website, Smithfield foods bought property,slaughter and transport operations in Romania in 2006 with the intention to distribute the meat products to western Europe,
http://www.litfood-fair.com/index.php?content=pages&lng=lt&page_id=103&news_id=1454
Smithfield also bought slaugher operations throughout the world including companies in South America.

Another piece of information worth reading, if you haven’t done so already is the Pew Commision’s report on Human Health and Industrial Farming, http://www.saveantibiotics.org/

[Ed Neumann]

Can you say NAFTA?

[anna]

To answer a post several posts up by Stephen - the reason there are more outbreaks of Salmonella and E Coli poisoning from produce rather than meat, is because most contaminated produce, such as tomatoes, sprouts, lettuce, spinach etc. is eaten raw whereas meat is cooked. No matter how contaminated anything is, if it's cooked properly, it aint going to give anyone food poisoning.

[Niranimal]

A 2006 United Nations report summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." The report recommended that animal agriculture "be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
The meat industry is killing our planet and us! - Go vegetarian!

[Tahler]

MEAT KILLS

FOX News has reported that there are indicaations that La Gloria—a Mexican village near the enormous Smithfield-owned Granjas Carroll factory pig farm—is home to the first confirmed case of swine flu and may have been ground zero for the outbreak.

[Deigh Covey]

The mainstream media hasn't been ontop of this either,

On May 6, 2009 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced, “WHO says H1N1 pigs must be kept out of food supply.”