|
On Pig Farming, or The
Tyranny of Monopoly Capitalism
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Editor's Note: Originally published in Poland in 2003 in
the
Gazeta
Wyborcza. We've taken the liberty to add a title
to this excellent piece about a lurking environmental, moral,
and political issue that Americans choose conveniently to ignore.--Hardly
Waite, PWG.
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 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 90 degree 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) |