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More excellent Smithfield-H1N1 coverage

by Paula | 29 April 2009 | permalink | comments [1]
Tags: food, disease

Fantastic, well-cited coverage of the Smithfield-H1N1 link from grain.org, website of the organization GRAIN which describes itself thus: “GRAIN is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.”

From A food system that kills: Swine flu is meat industry’s latest plague:

Experts have been warning for years that the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza. “Because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close together, they facilitate rapid transmission and mixing of viruses,” said scientists from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2006. Three years earlier, Science Magazine warned that swine flu was on a new evolutionary “fast track” due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations. It’s the same story with bird flu. The crowded and unsanitary conditions of the farms make it possible for the virus to recombine and take on new forms very easily. Once this happens, the centralised nature of the industry ensures that the disease gets carried far and wide, whether by feces, feed, water or even the boots of workers. Yet, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “no formal national surveillance system exists to determine what viruses are prevalent in the US swine population.” The same is true of Mexico.

. . .

After countless efforts by the community to get the authorities to help — efforts which led to the arrest of several community leaders and death threats against people speaking out against the Smithfield operations — local health officials finally decided to investigate in late 2008. Tests revealed that more than 60 per cent of the community of 3,000 people were infected by a respiratory disease, but officials did not confirm what the disease was.

. . .

While it has not been widely reported, the region around the community of La Gloria is also home to many large poultry farms. Recently, in September 2008, there was an outbreak of bird flu among poultry in the region. At the time, veterinary authorities assured the public that it was only a local incidence of a low-pathogenic strain affecting backyard birds. But we now know, thanks to a disclosure made by Marco Antonio Núñez López, the President of the Environmental Commission of the State of Veracruz, that there was also an avian flu outbreak on a factory farm about 50 kilometres from La Gloria owned by Mexico’s largest poultry company, Granjas Bachoco, that was not revealed because of fears of what it might mean for Mexico’s export markets. It should be noted that a common ingredient in industrial animal feed is “poultry litter”, which is a mixture of everything found on the floor of factory poultry farms: fecal matter, feathers, bedding, etc

. . .

It is not the first time and it will not be the last time that corporate farms conceal disease outbreaks and put people’s lives at risk. It is the nature of their business. A couple of years ago in Romania, Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. “Our doctors have not had access to the American [company’s] farms to effect routine inspections,” said Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority. “Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection.” Eventually, it emerged that Smithfield had been concealing a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian farms.

In Indonesia, where people are still dying from bird flu and where many health experts believe the next pandemic virus will emerge, authorities can still not enter large corporate farms without the permission of the company. In Mexico, authorities deflected calls to investigate La Granja Carroll and accused the residents of La Gloria of spreading infection because “they use home remedies instead of going to the health centres to cure their flu.”

Note that all bolding is mine, and that the original article is extensively footnoted, which I deleted here for the sake of readability. I encourage you to go read the full Grain.org report, including its footnotes.

Political implications of the Smithfield-H1N1 story

by Paula | 29 April 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: food, disease

The Smithfield-H1N1 story is finally picking up traction in the MSM. So far the Times Online has done the best job, at least as far as I’ve seen, making both the links and unknowns regarding Smithfield subsidiary Granjas Carroll’s role in the H1N1 outbreak clear. It also does an excellent job placing events in Perote in context.

The Mexican Government said it initially thought that the victim, Edgar Hernandez, 4, was suffering from ordinary influenza but laboratory testing has since shown that he had contracted swine flu. The boy went on to make a full recovery, although it is thought that at least 148 others in Mexico have died from the disease, and the number is expected to rise.

News of the infected boy is expected to create controversy in Mexico because the boy lived in Veracruz state, home to thousands of farmers who claim that their land was stolen from them by the Mexican Government in 1992. The farmers, who call themselves Los 400 Pueblos – The 400 Towns – are famous for their naked marches through the streets of Mexico City.

The boy’s hometown, La Gloria, is also close to a pig farm that raises almost 1 million animals a year. The facility, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, is partly owned by Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based US company and the world’s largest producer and processor of pork products. Residents of La Gloria have long complained about the clouds of flies that are drawn the so-called “manure lagoons” created by such mega-farms, known in the agriculture business as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

It is now known that there was a widespread outbreak of a powerful respiratory disease in the La Gloria area earlier this month, with some of the town’s residents falling ill in February. Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes.

Good god, who knew?? Talk about a black swan! If the outbreak is definitively tied to Granjas Carroll’s CAFOs in Perote, the whole world will side with the Mexican peasantry against predatory corporate practices in not only Mexico but the whole of Central & Latin America. The implications for the global food infrastructure are staggering.

For even further context, check out this comment at my original Smithfield-H1N1 post:

I live in Mexico and have lots of links (in spanish) about the connection between the swine flu outbreak and the operation of Granjas Carroll in La Gloria. Citizens of this town have been fighting for years trying to stop the dangerous activities of this multi-national company. They have been harassed, imprisoned and still await their sentence. Granjas Carroll and the corrupt mexican government treat these people like criminals and deny all evidence that the pandemic has any connection with the operation of the pig breeding farms in Mexico.

As soon as the people in La Gloria started to get sick and die, the inhabitants had no doubts about where the disease was coming from. Health authorities said that it was the people’s fault if they were getting sick because they used traditional remedies instead of going to the hospitals. But citizens were indeed seeking for medical help, only to find ignorance, not medicines there. The health authorities in Veracruz reported that people were getting sick because the climate was very cold and there was too much dust in the air.

It’s not necessary to be really smart to see that if we have a new virus coming from pigs and this virus originated in Mexico, then the most likely scenario would be that Granjas Carroll should be held responsible for this. There are pictures available of the contaminated water bodies and the large piles of dead pig bodies stacked out in the open. Wether the virus spread though the contact with contaminated water or through the flies it’s unclear. However, I think that Granjas Carroll owes an explaination to the mexican people and the rest of the world.

Do you have any idea about what can we do so that people start talking about this? Here in Mexico all this information has been hidden in the last few days and corruption is likely to win the battle if nobody takes action. I think this is a nice example about how free trade agreements and globalization can affect third world countries and ultimately, the rest of the world. Please help us spread the truth!!!

If you’re unemployed and wondering WTF to do to earn a living, think up something simple related to food. You can easily put together a local-foods buying club from your kitchen table, or partner with an existing CSA to make deliveries. At the very least you’ll be able to cover your own food ass.

The future of your food — a look at local food systems

by Paula | 16 October 2008 | permalink | comments [2]
Tags: food, peak oil

A couple weeks ago, Sharon Astyk shared a selection of alarming accounts from Great Depression I, in which a lack of credit/money created a tragic absurdity: countless tons of food of every kind rotting or being thrown away by farmers, while people at the far end of the supply line ate garbage and road kill, or starved, because no one could afford to ship goods from the country to the city. Her fear is that these scenes will be repeated very soon, and I share her fear.

Sharon writes:

The wheat crop is being planted right now — and next year’s food depends on this year’s credit. High energy and fertilizer prices have already eaten up much of farmer’s profit for this year — the point at which it is no longer feasible for farmers to grow our food is not so very far away, nor is it really so alien to imagine that again we might see the failure of the linkage between city and country, the poor digging in the garbage, the farmer unable to plant, unable to keep their land, or throwing food out to rot.

She’s absolutely right, but her answer is unworkable given the current state of local food systems. Sharon proposes:

More of us need to grow food, but more importantly, we will need to create direct ties between country and city, so that farmers and urban dwellers can skip middlemen who add costs and lower payments, and get what they really need.

Local food systems are something I’ve been studying fervently for a couple years now. I would not claim to be a bona-fide expert, but I do think I have a better handle on things than your average bear. To see why this is unworkable it’s necessary to understand the state of local food systems.

Globalization has completely destroyed the infrastructure that used to bring local and regional farmers’ goods together with city buyers. Some progress has been made in the past decade via farmers markets and CSAs — which have been growing at a comparatively tremendous clip — but this infrastructure is wholly separate from the existing system of grocery stores from which the vast majority of people get their food and other necessities.

There are many, many grocery stores that would very much like to cash in on the local foods craze right now but they can’t because of the lack of infrastructure. Their operations are tooled so that they can place a few gigantic orders each week with a few gigantic distributors or with their own distribution divisions. Grocers are not set up to deal with hundreds of small farmers all growing different crops harvested at different times — this is a logistics nightmare for them, and would consume so many resources there wouldn’t be any left to run the store.

The flip side of this coin is farmers markets and CSAs. I think we need to acknowledge straight up front that having dozens or hundreds of local small farmers driving their goods to three or more farmers markets each week, and/or distributing CSA shares all over town, and/or requiring subscribers to drive 30+ miles into the country to pick up their shares, is a seriously inefficient use of liquid hydrocarbons and will not be sustainable for much longer. Moreover, farmers selling via CSAs and farmers markets are able to cover their costs because they’re offering specialty goods: heirloom tomatoes, obscure breeds of chicken, blue corn, blood-red carrots and the like. Currently these fetch a premium price and certainly some farmers will be able to continue making a living selling such things to the upper class. But in short order, demand for pauper foods is going to balloon in direct proportion to the number of diesel trucks that can’t make their grocery store deliveries. In this case, CSAs and farmers markets will represent a massive bottleneck in the supply chain because they are just too small to handle the volume of subsistence food that will need to get through. Simply growing the number of farmers markets and CSAs is no help, either; this is an even further inefficient use of liquid hydrocarbons that will further drive up food prices or prevent goods from getting to people at all. And we’re right back where we started.

The “answer,” if there is one, is to funnel local and regional farmers’ goods into the existing grocery store system to maximize distribution reach and fuel efficiency, and to minimize the up-front costs of building an entirely new infrastructure. For a population center of 100,000 people, this shift could be made in less than two growing seasons and for an investment of less than $200,000 — but it requires one of those despicable middleman thingies.

The middleman, in this case, is a food broker. His job duties include:

• Maintaining a running and up-to-date catalogue of all the farmers in the area, where they’re located, what they’re growing, how much they’re growing, and when they expect to harvest;
• Maintaining a running and up-to-date catalogue of all the grocery stores and other food retailers in the area, including where they’re located and their sales volumes;
• Mapping the shortest distances between individual farmers and individual grocery stores; arranging the most fuel-efficient delivery routes and methods between farmers and grocery stores; procuring the trucks, biodiesel, rail car leases, labor, and other requirements for making deliveries happen;
• Scheduling pick-up and delivery of foods as they’re harvested, and keeping grocers informed as to what’s coming and when;
• Keeping accounts so that the grocery stores pay what they should and farmers receive what they’re due. This could be done on either a pass-through basis or by purchasing goods from the farmers outright and reselling them to the grocery stores.

The food brokerage would have to take a cut of the money that passes from grocer to farmer, it’s true, in order to cover operating expenses. But what is the community getting for this cost? 100,000 people now have access to at least some food, and the area’s farmers have access to buyers so that they can make enough money to plant next year. The broker has also created a number of jobs, kept at least a few grocery stores in operation which means at least a few more jobs, prevented a monumental waste of fuel, and in general mitigated all-out catastrophe. That seems like a pretty good bargain to me.

I have given this issue a lot of thought — enough thought to come up with the $200,000 and 100,000 people figures — and I just don’t see any other way to relocalize food systems for less cost or in any shorter time frame.

The biggest stumbling block in all of this is government regulation that dictates what farmers can and cannot grow. A farmer just outside the city who’s growing industrial soy is not free to simply switch his crop over to cabbage, potato, and rutabaga if he’s getting reimbursements from Uncle Sam, which is almost certainly the case. Doing so can potentially result in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines which could in turn cost him his farm. It may be that such regulations become unenforceable in the future but as it stands right now, farmers running operations over a certain size pretty much have their hands tied. If you want a political issue to champion, freeing farmers from the clutches of Monsanto, Cargill and ConAgra via that stinking heap of shit we know as the Food Bill will do more good than all the false hope and spare change in the world.

Finally, I just want to make a quick note about those despised and hated middlemen. Middlemen are not the enemy, nor are they a drain on the economy. What middlemen drain are the profits of huge corporations which universally prefer to sell directly to consumers and keep the retail markup for themselves. When dealing with a middleman such as a local retailer, manufacturers have to sell at wholesale price to the retailer who in turn adds a markup to cover the costs of buying whatever goods he’s selling, and of paying the bills, wages, and other expenses involved in keeping his operation going. Downtown areas get hollowed out precisely because middlemen get cut out of the equation. A healthy local economy requires many middlemen; these are the people who run shops, restaurants, and other businesses that keep people employed and money circulating in the community.

The distaste for middlemen is the result of various marketing campaigns during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then middlemen were called “jobbers” and manufacturers just hated them because they cut into profits. So the manufacturers began doing things like creating brand names for their goods to cultivate customer loyalty to the product, not the seller, who was often someone’s neighbor and a pillar in the community. At that point manufacturers were able to convince consumers to save money by “cutting out the middleman” through mail-order catalogs and the like. So, keep that in mind — the evil middleman is every bit a marketing fiction as the notion that diamonds represent marriage or that handguns have something to do with the Wild West.