David Sirota, The San Francisco Gate, May 8, 2009
The bacon-flavored themes probably aren’t purposefully repetitive, but that’s OK because these seemingly unrelated story lines share a common bond: They are each part of what might be called piggish capitalism – an economic theory that mixes subsidization, consolidation and deregulation – and it endangers us all.
Take the pandemic scare: The Associated Press says scientists suspect that swine flu began in a Mexican town that “has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm” partially owned by the Smithfield company. That’s the same Smithfield that used three decades of lax anti-trust enforcement and corporate welfare to become one of the few megacorporations now controlling global agribusiness.
Whether or not swine flu is ultimately attributed to this company is less important than the justifiable reason factory farming is a suspect. As Pew Charitable Trusts documented in 2008, researchers have long warned that industrial agriculture means high concentrations of waste, overuse of antibiotics and “continual cycling of viruses and other animal pathogens in large herds” – all factors that increase the possibility of diseases like swine flu.
Yet Congress has repeatedly rejected bills to mandate vigorous health inspections, stop agribusiness consolidation and stop subsidies underwriting that consolidation, meaning these companies are now so huge and unchecked that they can pose a worldwide threat when livestock-borne disease strikes. A virus that might have been constrained by small herds in our family-farm-dominated past can now exponentially metastasize in our factory-run present. Thus, Wired magazine’s article noting that “scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate.”
Unregulated, taxpayer-subsidized oligopoly spreading risk – sounds familiar, right? It should, because at the very moment agribusinesses were vertically and horizontally integrating themselves, so too were financial firms.
In 1999, five days before Congress rejected a proposal to temporarily stop agribusiness consolidation, President Bill Clinton signed a landmark deregulation measure that “ushered in an era of aggressive bank mergers,” as Reuters reports. The result was what critics like Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., predicted at the time: Wall Street created “a group of institutions which are too big to fail” and that “taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure.”
1 response so far ↓
internet elias // May 9, 2009 at 7:07 am |
Lots of mouths to feed in the world. And many American mouths are gluttonous. If agri-business is going to help provide enough food to fill the demand, it likely has to be done through mass production perpetuated by companies such as Smithfield and others. My family and I live in a rural area in close proximity to a hog farm. The broken down waste is ultimately sprayed onto pastureland as fertilizer. The run-off from the pastureland goes into nearby branches, then creeks, then rivers…and returns to us through the county’s water treatment facilities as chemically treated drinking water. With the increasing world-wide demand for food, there are definitely ‘opportunity cost.’ As we choose the animal foods, we likely give up an overall healthier outdoor environment. But that’s just my opinion.