Outsourcing Disease, Destruction

by Natasha Chart

categories: Community Development, Corporate Kneebiters, Farm Economics, Health, Indigenous Rights, Livestock, Plants, Policy, Pollution

Published May 01, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT

As linked to previously, wealthy countries whose own farmland is losing productivity are buying farmland in poor nations where the population may be illiterate and unaware of its rights when their governments approve selling their land out from under them.

Some of the countries have insisted that they'll hire locals, though industrial agriculture often explicitly employs fewer people, substituting fossil fuels and machinery for human labor. Some of them have promised to sell part of the crop locally, hopefully their will be jobs available for now-landless subsistence households that pay enough for them to buy a sufficiency of food.

Would it help if they promised to mitigate ecological damage? If industrial farming could really do that, countries practicing it probably wouldn't be so worried about losing farmland at home. I mean, it seems like it'd be less hassle to just take care of what you've got?

Would it help if they promised to be less polluting? Well, industrial agriculture needs a lot of chemicals in order to manage that prized workforce reduction. Biotech crops are notorious for having been most frequently engineered to tolerate pesticides, and for mainly being successful and a tremendous sales tool for chemicals like glyphosate, aka Roundup.

Do poor nations need their populations to have increased risks of birth defects during spraying season? I would submit that no one needs that.

Would it help if they promised to follow the highest standards of sanitary livestock practice? Well, look what a mess industrial livestock farming has made wherever it's been allowed. Let's take, say, hog farming.

The picture up at the top of this post is, obviously, of a family of pigs running around in a grass-covered pasture. To the immediate left is a picture of pigs in a confinement barn.

Which one of those lifestyles looks more sanitary for the pigs?

As it happens, the obvious answer is the correct one..

Factory farms are known breeding grounds for pathogens that regularly violate US environmental standards. So they've moved South, to countries where regulations are less stringent. Some bloggers are calling this the NAFTA flu, because NAFTA has a lot more to do with the spread of this farming method and its diseases than any pigs, as Robert Wallace writes at Farming Pathogens:

... There is, then, another reason why the ’swine flu’ tag fails. It detracts from an obvious point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.

Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy. ...

As Wallace goes on to note, it was reported in Science that swine flus of the H1N1 variants got a jumpstart in their evolution in 1998, mixing with human flus in the hog barns of North Carolina. Ever since, they've been mutating like crazy, incorporating new strains and regularly tossing off new variants.

Should Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary not be directly to blame, this flu got its start in the livestock production model they've profited from and spread.

But ... this mess sounds like a good idea to keep exporting to even more countries. International officials think it'll be a win-win. Right, right.

And someday, pigs will fly.

(Photo credit: Grongar on Flickr and the Wikipedia Commons, via Answer.com's factory farming information page.)