Agribusiness
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Poorly educated
women, often of ethnic minorities, many of them immigrants, do the hardest,
dirtiest, most dangerous work––until their bodies fail them. Pushers on almost every busy street corner stoke the addictions that already kill more Americans than any other cause, and have created the world's deadliest drug problem. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy David Pearce | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Their suppliers rank
among the global leaders in dumping toxic waste.
Kingpins of this mob, some already convicted of political corruption reaching clear to the White House, are now muscling into position to siphon off the hard-won economic gains of the developing world. Yet legally speaking, anyway, we're not talking about Organized Crime. They're the Meat Mob. They're big on family, as in family restaurants. But they also devour their own. Wendy's International restaurant chain founder Dave Thomas, for instance, in December 1996 underwent a coronary bypass operation for repair of cholesterol-clogged arteries. Thomas was 64. Public and media enjoyed the irony that the Wendy's signature menu item is a bacon cheeseburger, possibly the most cholesterol-loaded regular menu item in the cholesterol-heavy fast food market. But there was nothing unusual in Thomas' plight. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The National Center for Health Statistics recorded the deaths of 2.3 million Americans in 1995. Heart disease killed 32%; cancers killed 23%; stroke killed 6.8%. These were the top three killers. They are degenerative conditions, increasing in frequency with age, and would probably be the top killers even if every American ate a healthy balanced diet, got plenty of exercise, and did not smoke. | 
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Photograph courtesy Wendy's | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| But victims would
be much older. Heart disease, cancer, and stroke tend to strike decades
prematurely, with improper diet a causal factor. To be specific, Americans
ingest far too much of a particular type of fat, cholesterol, found only in
animal products and byproducts. Physicians have known for decades that
cholesterol build-ups cause clogged arteries that contribute to the onset of
heart attacks and stroke, and amplify the consequences. Cholesterol build-up,
exascerbating direct harm done to the cardiovascular system by the nicotine in
tobacco smoke, even increases the likelihood that a smoker will be among the
estimated 170,000 Americans per year who die from cancers and other diseases
associated with smoking.
More than 300 studies published in recent editions of medical journals have already documented the association between meat and chronic disease. "We now know that cigarette smoking, alcohol, and ordinary foods together are associated with almost all of excess cancer," Philip H. Abelson editorialized in the January 10, 1992 edition of Science. Five years later, his statement has only been reinforced. "The contribution from foods is about as great as that from smoking," Abelson continued. "Two examples of causative agents in foods are excessive amounts of fats and salt," both associated with eating meat. "Western populations that derive 40 to 45% of their food calories from fats experience comparatively high mortality from cancers of the postmenopausal breast, distal colon, ovary, endometrium, pancreas, and prostate." Fairly typical of subsequent scientific findings was a study of 35,000 women under 69 years of age, done by James Cerhan and team at the University of Iowa––an institution heavily endowed by the feed grain and hog industries, and not exactly a bastion of radical vegetarians. Cerhan et al reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association of May 1, 1996 that women who ate more than four servings of red meat per month had twice the risk of getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, than those who ate less. Four servings of red meat per month is the equivalent of just one hamburger per week. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has increased 73% since 1975, especially among older people. Demographic data suggests good reason to isolate red meat consumption as a critical variable in searching for the causal factors––especially among women. Since 1975, U.S. red meat consumption per capita has declined 12%, despite a 13% per capita rise overall in consumption of animal-based foods. Consumption, according to U.S. Bureau of the Census and Department of Agriculture data from fiscal year 1994, is closely age-related:
Also evident is the association of red meat eating with mortality. Younger people, more likely to be single and to eat out, consume slightly more red meat than young families, predominant in the next age bracket. Thereafter, red meat consumption rises steadily with age and income, up to the oldest bracket, where the survivors are those who eat less. Almost the same trend shows in relation to consumption of all types of animal-based food. The case for a general relationship between animal-based food consumption and mortality is thrown off, however, by the highest spending on animal-based food appearing in the upper age range, even after red meat consumption plummets. But because deaths from chronic conditions are far more prevalent than deaths from acute illness, demographics alone don't show the deadly effects of meat contamination. Rather, demographics tend to suggest only what "safe" meat does to people of average overall health. The growing weight of studies like Cerhan's provide the confirmation. Contamination The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine puts the cost of meat-related degenerative illness to the U.S. economy at about $40 billion per year. Meat-related acute illness raises the total annual cost close to the $50 billion per year estimated cost of smoking. Meat-related acute illness includes the whole range of bacterial infections and poisonings associated with contaminated meat. These, as illustrated by the tragic deaths of four youngsters from eating Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers in January 1993, hit mainly children and the aged. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The first major update of the USDA meat inspection statutes in 90 years finally began phase-in, after more than 10 years of hearings, litigation, and legislation, on February 2, 1997. During the long debate, Americans learned––if paying attention––that USDA assurance of meat safety is relative, not absolute. | 
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Photograph courtesy Jack in the Box | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The low-end
estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that food-borne
bacteria, almost entirely from meat and animal byproducts, kills 9,000 Americans
per year and causes at least 33 million episodes of nonfatal acute illness.
Thus bacterial contamination of meat officially killed 6,000 more Americans from 1990 through 1996, a seven-year span, as were killed in the Vietnam War from the deployment of ground troops in 1965 through the end of the draft in 1972. Meat contamination casualties cost the U.S. as much as $9.4 billion a year in immediate medical costs, plus $13 million a year to cope with longterm care of the estimated one million victims of meat contaminations who suffer longterm disability. The CDCP recognizes these as low-end estimates because the symptoms of food-related illnesses often go unrecognized. If underreporting occurs in the U.S. at the rate that Health Canada foodborne disease chief researcher Jeff Wilson believes it does in Canada, the actual totals could be eight times higher. The U.S. toll could then be slightly higher, over four years, than U.S. combat deaths during World War II. Preliminary testing to assess the need for e-coli andsalmonella contamination standards in 1992 discovered e-coli in 99% of the chickens tested and a third of the red meat slaughterhouses. The USDA believes salmonella enteritidis still afflicts as many as 45% of all U.S. egg-producing flocks, whose "spent hens" may nonetheless end up in the chicken soup often used as a folk remedy for common illness. Yet even the biggest of the 6,186 federally inspected U.S. meat plants won't have to test their output regularly for e-coli and salmonella contamination until January 1998, one year after testing requirement was announced. Testing won't be required at every federally inspected slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant until July 1, 2000––and the federal rules don't necessarily apply to all of the 2,893 slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants that are inspected by state authorities. Further, the new USDA rules do not require testing for several other forms of bacterial contamination that are reportedly on the rise, including Staphylococcus aureaus, the reputed deadliest food-borne bacteria, and campyobacter, found in the guts of poultry, pigs, and cattle about 10 times as often as e-coli, according to recent Health Canada research. Already, the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service records more than 500,000 meat contamination incidents per year in slaughter and packing plants, despite the certainty that the inspection staff of just 6,300 is spread thin. As of June 1996, the Food Safety Inspection Service had left unfilled 800 fulltime jobs and 570 part-time jobs, for a 19% vacancy rate in slaughterhouses and a 15% vacancy rate in processing plants, resulting in more than a million unfulfilled tasks per year–– including "checking for product adulteration and unsafe handling, unsafe buildings, equipment malfunctions and failure to separate raw or dirty products from food that is cooked or clean," said the Government Accountability Project. Pollution The contamination inside meat plants often takes special equipment and training to detect.Detecting meat industry pollution outdoors rarely takes more than a working nose––as North Carolina learned in June 1995. First 900,000 gallons of hog slurry spilled from a ruptured farm lagoon in Sampson County. Then 25 million gallons poured out of another in Onslow County, killing as many as 40 million fish in the Neuse River and Atlantic Ocean near where the Neuse empties. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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While media were still looking, that spill was followed by more than 100 others, both on the Neuse and other rivers. At least 250 smaller spills had occurred during the previous 10 years, to little notice, as the North Carolina hog industry rapidly expanded, assisted in evading regulation by the election of prominent hog farmers to both state and federal office. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy PETA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Red tides followed, killing fish from the Carolinas to Florida, putting shellfish off limits for human consumption, and––far to the south––killing record numbers of endangered manatees. One of the deadly agents turned out to be pfiesteria, a dinoflagellate single-celled organism that reportedly thrives in slurry spillage, metamorphizes into as many as nine different forms, eats fish alive, and can pass to humans. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| North Carolina State University botanist JoAnn Burkholder first identified pfiesteria in 1991, recognizing it as severely neurotoxic to humans in 1993. Agricultural clout within regulatory agencies suppressed her findings, however, until the human impacts were too obvious to ignore, moving author Rodney Barker to recount her struggle to warn the public in a best-selling book, And the Waters Turned to Blood. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph of JoAnn Burkholder courtesy Pamlico NC® | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Farmers for
Fairness, a pork industry front, countered on May 14 with a 30-second TV ad that
blames North Carolina river pollution on "sewage treatment plants in
cities." The Raleigh News & Observer meanwhile revealed in December 1996 that state testing had discovered hog effluent in more than a third of a sampling of 948 private water wells. Eighty-nine were so polluted that the users were warned to drink bottled water. Subsequent investigation funded by the North Carolina Pork Producers Association counter-claimed that the source of much of the pollution might actually have been nitrate fertilizer used to grow corn to feed hogs. Either way, the nitrate level reportedly poses a potential cancer threat. Pollution is a problem wherever meat production is concentrated. Just in the first third of 1997: • The Bil Mar Foods turkey slaughtering plant at Borculo, Michigan, owned by the Sara Lee Corporation, was charged with violating state wastewater discharge limits on every day of 1996. Bil Mar agreed to pay a fine of $300,000, and to make $2.4 million worth of improvements to waste treatment equipment. • West Virginia listed the Potomac and six major tributaries with the Environmental Protection Agency as "agricultural pollution trouble spots," after a joint state/federal study released in June 1996 found 75% of the manure storage sites serving about 100 million chickens and 80,000 cattle to be "inadequate." Leaking manure slurry was associated with elevated levels of fecal coliform and streptococci bacteria, which may indicate the presence of cryptosporidium. The latter killed 100 Milwaukeeans in 1993, entering drinking water from an unknown source apparently associated with meat production. • DeCoster Farms, owners of 30 hog confinement barns in Iowa, was fined $59,000 for polluting waterways. Two more sets of similar charges are pending––and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources is probing the April 21 discovery of a field drainage tile at a DeCoster facility that was apparently used to illegally sluice hog slurry into a well. • Seeking penalties totaling more than $500,000, Missouri attorney general Jay Nixon sued the Simmons Foods chicken slaughterhouse at Siloam Springs for allegedly violating state water pollution standards from 1985 to mid-1996. • Testifying against pollution created by Lillja Hatcheries, of Houston, James Followell "said his child cried himself to sleep, begging the family to move so that he can play outside again," George Flynn of the Houston Chronicle reported. "Margie Shipley said a house painter first thought he had stepped into animal manure, then vomited in the back yard when the full impact of the smell hit him." DeWayne Henson "had to get rid of his hot tub and end his nghtly jogging in the neighborhood. Retiree Charles Topping likened the odor to the smells of decaying enemy casualties on Iwo Jima." Eating workers North Carolina in particular is favored by both the hog and poultry industries not only because of lax pollution regulations, but also because of a "right-to-work" law that prohibits contracts which require employees to pay union dues. As the heavily unionized red meat industry contracts in the midwest through increasing centralization and mechanization, the virtually non-unionized poultry industry and non-unionized segment of the pork industry employ ever more people––who are collectively getting an ever smaller share of the returns. Since 1963, the percentage of unionized meat workers in the U.S. has dropped by half. Union wages in meatpacking averaged $19 an hour in 1980, but have dropped below $12––still close to double the average wage throughout the industry. Abuses are both rife and familiar. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Egg City, long one of the biggest poultry producers in California, was unionized by the United Farm Workers in 1979 after a five-year struggle led by the late Cesar Chavez, but a bankruptcy judge in 1986 invalidated the contract, enabling new management to impose an across-the-boards 30% wage cut. Chavez, a vegetarian, died while trying to revive the organizing effort. The workers remained unrepresented when Egg City closed due to obsolesence in October 1996. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph of Cesar Chavez courtesy UCLA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In 1989 National
Public Radio and the Washington Post reported that Perdue workers in Lewiston,
North Carolina, were routinely fired if they reported injuries. Former labor
organizer Henry Spira, now president of Animal Rights International, amplified
the charges in newspaper ads.
"Up to 30% of the workers in that factory are afflicted with repetitive motion syndrome," the ads stated, "a potentially crippling disorder of the hands or wrists caused by having to cut up to 75 chickens per minute. A Perdue personnel memo stated that it was normal for about 60% of workers to go to the (company) nurse for pain killers and to have their hands bandaged. Donna Bazemore, a former employee, told National Public Radio that she'd seen women urinating and vomiting on the work line because they were not allowed to leave it to go to the bathroom. None of the Perdue factories is unionized. And in 1986, Frank Perdue told the president's commission on organized crime that he sought help from organized crime figures to keep it that way." Eight years later, the noise has subsided, but little seems to have changed at the worker level. Indeed, the illness and injury rate for the meat industry across the boards has risen to 36 lost-time cases per 100 workers per year, as federal safety inspections have dropped 43% since 1994. Preventing workers from using restrooms at will still seems to be standard practice in poultry plants, as a local television program in May 1996 reportedly used a hidden camera to document yet another instance of it at the Hudson Farms poultry processing plant in Noel, Missouri. Case history Former Perdue executive Thomas Shelton, meanwhile, has become an industry power in his own right, modeling his empire, Case Farms, after the Perdue operation–– apparently down to the details. On January 23, 1997, Case employees Carlos Matheu and Luis Gonzalez testified at a National Press Club news conference hosted by the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice that they and other Case production line personnel must ask permission to use restrooms, are obliged to work with cuts on their hands, must buy their own safety equipment, and on one occasion in August 1996 were locked inside the Case slaughterhouse in Morganton, North Carolina, after they threatened to go on strike. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Of the 550 Case
indoor workers, an estimated 90% are Spanish-speaking. Case made a particular
effort to attract Guatemalan immigrants, who are reputedly especially docile, a
legacy of centuries of political repression in their native land. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Case hiring
practices "forced the city of Morganton to absorb an influx of newcomers
that is straining services and fueling resentment," Craig Whitlock of theRaleigh
News & Observer reported in November 1996. But prospective workers who
expected to earn as much as $7.50 an hour found themselves actually earning much
less. Conditions were so bad that in May 1995, after Case fired three workers
who complained, 300 workers walked out, then voted to join the Laborers
International Union of North America. Resisting National Labor Relations Board
orders to negotiate, which have been upheld in federal court, Case is still
pursuing appeals. The workers still don't have a contract, but safety and
sanitation are reportedly better, and the average wage is up to $6.85 an hour.
Case is also resisting unionization in Holmes County, Ohio. "Case Farms has about 350 workers and a turnover rate of more than 100% a year," United Food and Commercial Workers Union organizer Louis J. Maholic told Karen Long of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in March 1997. "They don't last long. They process 90 birds per minute, with lots of cut injuries, with their hands slippery from eviscerating chickens, and crowding that causes them to cut each other with sharp knives. They know nothing of workers' compensation and go without medical care. Some of these workers go two shifts and sleep in the lunchroom." Perhaps the most notorious recent example of meat industry labor abuse came on September 3, 1991, when 25 workers were killed and 56 injured in a fire at the Imperial Food Products Ltd. chicken processing plant at Hamlet, North Carolina. A medical examiner found that illegally locked and/or blockaded doors contributed to most of the deaths. Incredibly, a USDA inspector had approved locking one fire door––which he had no authority to do. Although the plant had previous fires in 1980 and 1983, state labor inspectors had never visited. Owner Emmett Roe in 1992 pleaded guilty to 25 counts of manslaughter, drawing a 20-year prison sentence, of which he actually served four and a half years, 65 days for each of the dead, at a minimum security facility with neither fences nor armed guards. He was paroled on April 18, 1997. The surviving injured workers and families of the dead only won the right to sue the state for failure to enforce safety codes on February 4, 1997, after a five-year battle that went to the state Court of Appeals. Damage claims will be limited to $100,000 per victim. The Case hiring practices "forced the city of Morganton to absorb an influx of newcomers that is straining services and fueling resentment," Craig Whitlock of the Raleigh News & Observer reported in November 1996. But prospective workers who expected to earn as much as $7.50 an hour found themselves actually earning much less. Conditions were so bad that in May 1995, after Case fired three workers who complained, 300 workers walked out, then voted to join the Laborers International Union of North America. Resisting National Labor Relations Board orders to negotiate, which have been upheld in federal court, Case is still pursuing appeals. The workers still don't have a contract, but safety and sanitation are reportedly better, and the average wage is up to $6.85 an hour. Case is also resisting unionization in Holmes County, Ohio. "Case Farms has about 350 workers and a turnover rate of more than 100% a year," United Food and Commercial Workers Union organizer Louis J. Maholic told Karen Long of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in March 1997. "They don't last long. They process 90 birds per minute, with lots of cut injuries, with their hands slippery from eviscerating chickens, and crowding that causes them to cut each other with sharp knives. They know nothing of workers' compensation and go without medical care. Some of these workers go two shifts and sleep in the lunchroom." Perhaps the most notorious recent example of meat industry labor abuse came on September 3, 1991, when 25 workers were killed and 56 injured in a fire at the Imperial Food Products Ltd. chicken processing plant at Hamlet, North Carolina. A medical examiner found that illegally locked and/or blockaded doors contributed to most of the deaths. Incredibly, a USDA inspector had approved locking one fire door––which he had no authority to do. Although the plant had previous fires in 1980 and 1983, state labor inspectors had never visited. Owner Emmett Roe in 1992 pleaded guilty to 25 counts of manslaughter, drawing a 20-year prison sentence, of which he actually served four and a half years, 65 days for each of the dead, at a minimum security facility with neither fences nor armed guards. He was paroled on April 18, 1997. The surviving injured workers and families of the dead only won the right to sue the state for failure to enforce safety codes on February 4, 1997, after a five-year battle that went to the state Court of Appeals. Damage claims will be limited to $100,000 per victim. DeCoster of eggs The egg-and-chicken producer DeCoster Farms, of Turner, Maine, was fined $46,250 in June 1988 for 184 labor standards violations of federal labor––and was then caught, in September 1992, keeping as many as 100 workers from Mexico, Texas, and Central America in virtual slavery. Confined to company housing when not on the job, the Spanish-speaking workers were threatened with deportation if they left without authorization, and were not allowed visitors. Priests, social workers, and truant officers were barred. Fined $15,000 for those offenses in January 1993, DeCoster took the case to the Maine Supreme Court, which ruled against the company in January 1995. That was just the start of a drama now running for more than 28 months. Trying to enforce the court verdict, U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich on July 12, 1996 announced that DeCoster would be fined $3.6 million for continuing noncompliance with health and safety standards. Violations recorded by OSHA included failures to install required guards on equipment, 10 months after a worker lost parts of three fingers because the guards were missing; workers not paid overtime despite logging from 80 to 100 hours a week on the job; workers paid below the minimum wage or not at all; hiring children as young as nine; preventing workers from attending Catholic services; and allowing supervisors to physically intimidate staff. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Owner Austin "Jack" DeCoster appealed the fine and appointed a blue-ribbon panel of prominent Maine business people to oversee improvements. Within three months they all quit in frustration.In the interim, DeCoster was fined by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection for building an unauthorized wastewater treatment system; OSHA testing found fecal contamination in workers' drinking water; and DeCoster replaced an allegedly abusive manager with John William Glessner Jr., 34, who held a similar post at one of the 30 DeCoster hog operations in Iowa until shortly after he and another DeCoster hog plant manager were convicted in July 1996 of the 1995 beating of worker Lucas Ortega. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ortega, 19, was
allegedly pulled from his apartment and down a flight of stairs by his hair,
tied hand and foot with duct tape, then slapped and punched.
After the blue-ribbon panel quit, DeCoster evicted employees from substandard company housing two weeks before Christmas. Another OSHA fine followed, this time $117,000 for alleged serious mishandling of pesticides. Still resisting federal directives, DeCoster in January 1997 paid for a newspaper ad defending his practices, signed by 75 workers, many of whom later told media they had not known what they were signing. As result of the appeal, DeCoster on May 20 won a reduction in the biggest fine to $2 million, barely half the original amount, with the remainder suspended on condition that at least 90% of the allegedly abusive conditions are corrected within one more year. About 100 workers will divide $21,000 in settlement of unpaid wage claims. According to Susan Rayfield of the Portland Press Herald, DeCoster announced the deal with a "free" chicken banquet for workers, then docked them for the time they spent eating it, canceled overtime, and speeded up the production lines. DeCoster's Iowa egg plant was meanwhile fined $489,950 on October 24, 1996, for 15 serious safety violations. AgriGeneral principles A similar struggle is underway at the 2.5-million-hen AgriGeneral egg farm near LaRue, Ohio. Opened over much local opposition in September 1995, AgriGeneral promised to create jobs in the community, but when locals were unwilling to endure 13-to-16-hour days at $5.50 an hour with no overtime, migrant workers were imported from Mexico. In November 1996, the Ohio Department of Health hit AgriGeneral for 30 violations of health and safety codes at company housing. The Ohio EPA meanwhile proposed a $128,000 fine for illegal AgriGeneral wastewater discharges, noting that another AgriGeneral egg farm in Ohio hadn't cleaned up its act until after it was fined $100,000 in 1985 for allegedly causing a 1983 fish kill. Matters escalated after the United Food and Commercial Workers Union tried to organize the AgriGeneral work force, parallel to the organizing effort at Case Farms. In mid-March 1997, 25 current and former Agri-General workers sued for unpaid back wages, with legal help from the Ohio Public Interest Research Group and the Equal Justice Foundation. They further accused AgriGeneral of obliging them to pack and ship bad eggs. Three of the then-current workers were fired within a week. Agri-General said it simply had no work for them, but it had published "help wanted" ads in a local newspaper right up to the day of the firings. On April 31, 1997, AgriGeneral counterattacked, suing Ohio PIRG and OPIRG director Amy Simpson under a new state law against disparaging food products without a scientific basis. Critics contend the law is unconstitutional. Workers won two rounds elsewhere on March 25, 1997, when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the Cagle's Inc. poultry slaughtering plant at Macon, Georgia, $1.27 million for 23 alleged deliberate violations of federal safety rules plus three more accidental violations that were deemed "serious." On the same day, the Labor Department announced that Hanover Foods Corp., of Clayton, Delaware, would be fined $498,000 for similar violations. The size of the fines is impressive, but companies are often allowed to pay OSHA fines by making safety improvements, so that in effect they may not actually be penalized, just forced to comply with laws long flouted. Despite all that, the major item on the 105th Congress calendar pertaining to poultry industry labor is the 1997 Family Farmer Cooperative Marketing Amendment to the Agricultural Fair Practices Act of 1967, introduced by Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) with little chance of passage. The Kaptur bill would require "good faith" bargaining on the part of processors with organizations of farmers, many of whom argue that under the current contract production system they are in effect sharecroppers who bear a disproportionate burden of both initial investment and ongoing operating costs. In effect, farmers would be empowered to unionize, even as they fight unionization by their own personnel. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Kaptur bill would implement recommendations issued by the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration. The National Contract Poultry Growers Association previously sought state-level legislation to facilitate unionizing farmers, but a proposed "bill of rights for poultry growers" was defeated in Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. The Arkansas Contract Poultry Growers Association couldn't even find a legislative sponsor for such a bill. A bill somewhat strengthening the position of poultry growers did get through the Mississippi legislature in 1996, but was vetoed by the governor. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy PETA | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The National
Contract Poultry Growers meanwhile joined the National Farmers Union, National
Family Farm Coalition, and Citizen Action in attacking the November 1996
announcement by Labor Secretary Robert Reich that a "targeted enforcement
project" would investigate complaints by the National Interfaith Committee
for Worker Justice about worker housing and safety in Arkansas and North
Carolina. "Sweatshop conditions will not be tolerated," Reich said.
The National Broiler Council called it "just one more attempt by labor unions and their supporters to drum up support for their organizing campaigns." Any cabinet-level action by the Clinton administration with potential wide-ranging impact on the poultry industry would run afoul of top-level lobbying pressure from longtime Clinton backer Don Tyson, senior chairman of the Tyson Foods Inc. board. Tyson, 66, is son of company founder John Tyson. Semi-retired since the end of 1994, Don Tyson remains "an active unofficial lobbyist," according to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter D.R. Stewart, who recently examined Tyson Inc. filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to discover that, "In 1996, Tyson, whose reputation for wild parties is exceeded only by his business acumen, received $720,000 in salary; $571,720 in travel and entertainment expenses; and $398,119 for income tax liabilities related to his travel and entertainment budget," which increased 35.4% post-retirement. Tyson retired, at least on paper, after Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy resigned under intense criticism for accepting gifts, airline tickets, and admission to sporting events from Tyson Inc. lobbyist Jack Williams. A federal jury on March 21, 1997 convicted Williams on two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. Tyson himself paid a civil penalty of $46,125 for violating insider trading laws in connection with the 1992 Tyson Foods purchase of Arctic Alaska Fisheries Corporation. The labor problems of the poultry industry are also surfacing at some of the newer hog slaughtering plants––such as the Lundy Packing Company, of Clinton, North Carolina, whose owners and directors reportedly include U.S. Senator Lauch Fairclough. After sick workers complained to United Food and Commercial Workers health and safety director Jackie Nowell in 1993, federal testing found 43 people with antibodies to brucellosis among a killing floor staff of 154. Sixteen of the 43 people with apparent exposure had apparently actually suffered the disease. The outbreak apparently resulted from inhaling microscopic droplets of blood from infected hogs. Fines totalling $13,500 were eventually levied against Lundy for violating indoor air quality standards, but were reduced on appeal. Fairclough, with $19.8 million worth of holdings in nine different hog operations, blamed the episode on "a mean union." The same Lundy plant came under Occupational Health and Safety Administra-tion scrutiny again in August 1996, after night shift worker Solomon Velasquez, 18, was decapitated while hosing out an industrial blender. Nowell told OSHA that Velasquez, a native of Guatemala, had been working with dangerous equipment since age 16, in violation of child labor laws; that some of the equipment lacked lock-down devices to prevent it from being accidentally turned on during cleaning; and that two other workers had lost hands in similar accidents during 1995, which were not reported to state authorities. In addition, another worker lost several fingers in such an accident just a month before Velasquez was killed. Labor unions are strongest in the beef sector, but Iowa Beef Packers Inc., with a recruited work force largely of Hispanic and Laotian immigrants, illegally withheld $7 million in unpaid wages from 1986-1988 until April 1, 1996, when U.S. District Judge Earl O'Connor of Kansas City found the firm to be in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and ordered payment. Animal husbandry Though many meat industry workers are treated "like animals," animals of course do most of the suffering and dying, on a scale almost boggling the imagination. The dying is inevitable, but suffering is also engineered into the system––and industry lobbyists are aggressively cutting off avenues for reform. With the April 1997 passage of an agricultural exemption act in Tennessee, farm animals of every species are now exempted from humane laws in at least 30 states, with more bills to roll back humane standards pending. The 7.5 billion broiler chickens slaughtered in the U.S. each year––93% of all the animals killed for human consumption–– are also exempted from protection by the Humane Slaughter Act, and indeed from all other federal animal protective legislation. Their average lifespan is about 50 days. Brief as it is, however, many broiler chickens and a billion-odd "spent" laying hens who go to slaughter each year endure considerable pain. According to poultry industry researcher N.C. Gregory, who published the findings in World's Poultry Science Journal, about 12.4 million chickens per year are dead on arrival at slaughtering plants, due to rough handling, while 68 million suffer broken bones. The injuries are caused by workers who at Perdue Farms plants are expected to grab and handle more than 7,100 chickens apiece during each 12-hour shift. Yet the chickens have nowhere to run: more than 97% of hens live their whole lives within spaces neither higher nor wider than a standard sheet of typing paper. Turkeys fare little better. Such crowded conditions are ready-made for epidemics––and they happen. Of the 900 North Carolina turkey farmers, for instance, 42 that formerly supplied turkeys to WLR Farms Inc. and three more in South Carolina lost their contracts on April 1 because of inability to contain an unidentified antibiotic-resistant disease, occurring since 1991, which keeps the birds from gaining weight. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rarely, however, do such epidemics attract public attention. When the public does notice, the tendency is to suppose that the resulting toll is extraordinary. The world was appalled, for example, in early 1997, when Taiwanese troops invaded farms to slaughter and burn an estimated 4.3 million pigs who might have been exposed to hoof-and-mouth disease. The Dali Lama led public mourning for the pigs. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A year earlier,
under similar scrutiny, Britain escalated the slaughter and incineration of
cattle to prevent the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as
"mad cow disease." This disease apparently emerged as a consequence of
feeding cattle dietary supplements made from the offal of sheep and other
cattle, a practice popularized coincidental with the development of factory
farming, which separated many cattle from the minerals they formerly took
directly from the earth as they grazed, licking up small amounts of soil with
each mouthful of grass. Induced cannibalism enabled the sheep disease scrapie to
jump the species barrier, mutate, and apparently jump into human meat consumers,
producing a variant of the rare Cruetzfeld-Jakob Disease, formerly known only in
older people, that strikes the young.
Though the number of authenticated CJD cases with an apparent link to BSE is still in the dozens rather than even the hundreds or thousands, public panic over the prospect of developing a brain disease from eating hamburger is nonetheless intense enough that governments around the world have killed thousands more cattle just on suspicion that they might have been exposed at some point to a BSE source. The USDA mandated such prophylactic killing relatively early in the CJD scare––just as it has mandated high-volume killing to rid the U.S. of hoof-and-mouth disease; Newcastle's disease, which strikes wild birds and poultry; bovine tuberculosis; and brucellosis, among many other diseases to which lethal response is reflexive and swift. Transport Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is likewise the general attitude toward livestock transport––not only not effectively covered by humane legislation, but also not well covered by federal legislation designed to protect food safety. What federal legislation concerning livestock transport does exist is largely left over from the era of train travel. Relatively little applies to livestock transport by truck. The 104th Congress did pass a bill, as yet unimplemented by regulations, to improve the treatment of horses in transit to slaughter. In 1994, the most recent year for which complete figures are available, 348,000 horses were butchered in the eight U.S. horse-slaughterhouses, while 26,612 horses were exported to Canada for slaughter. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Another eight to nine billion animals are hauled to their deaths each year with virtually no protection against cruel treatment. They will typically not receive food, nor water beyond the minimum necessary to keep most of them alive. They will be crowded together as closely as is practicable. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy Barrett Trailer | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cattle, hogs, and
sheep usually ride in double-decked vehicles; those on top defecate and urinate
on those below. Poultry usually ride in stacked crates, protected from the
elements––if protected at all––by just a plastic tarp.
Livestock transport has become an international humane cause celebre several times in recent years, including in Europe during the winter of 1994-1995, when protests that several times broke into riots temporarily halted the export of live animals from Britain to continental nations, and in Australia and New Zealand in September 1996, after the sheep transport vessel Uniceb burned and sank, killing all 67,488 sheep aboard en route to Jordan. Both episodes received some U.S. media attention. Never was it mentioned, however, that livestock are routinely transported as far or farther to slaughter in the U.S. than the farthest journeys undertaken in Europe. Nor was it mentioned that the toll of 67,488 sheep was slightly less than the number of chickens (70,000 on average) who die in transport to U.S. poultry slaughterhouses during any given two-day interval. The only "good news" pertaining to livestock transport during the past several decades is that while the number of animals transported has steadily increased, the average distance of transport has decreased, due to the increasing concentration of immense poultry and hog growing facilities, and even cattle feedlots, close to slaughtering plants. The overcrowding and stress of transport, even over short distances, tends to create conditions even more conducive to the spread of disease than the typical barn conditions––especially since livestock producers are usually obliged to discontinue several days before transport the regular prophylactic antibiotic doses that most factory-farmed animals receive in their feed. Some producers and transporters keep dosing their stock anyway. The Food and Drug Administration and the Michigan Department of Agriculture set up a 1996 sting operation that won fines of $25,000 against brothers Richard and Jeffrey Gorr, of Petersburg, Michigan, for selling cattle who had been given antibiotics and had not been off the antibiotics for long enough for their bodies to flush out the residues. The fines were meant as a warning to other producers. The potential risk to humans from ingesting antibiotic residues and traces of other veterinary drugs with meat has long been recognized. Yet a greater risk of meat industry antibiotic use was almost completely overlooked until under five years ago: the role it has in speeding the evolution of super-microbes, resistant to conventional antibiotics and ever harder to fight with newly developed alternatives. Warned Dr. Stuart Levy of Tufts University in his 1992 book The Antibiotic Paradox, "Antibiotic usage has stimulated evolutionary changes unparalleled in recorded biologic history." Two years later, microbiologist Alexander Tomasz of Rockefeller University told the 1994 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the longterm effects of prophylactic antibiotic applications appear to be "nothing short of a medical disaster." Today, the Taiwanese hoof-and-mouth epidemic, an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant cholera in Hong Kong with possible links to antibiotic use in poultry, and a host of other regional plagues underscore the Levy and Tomasz warnings. British experts have been stumped since 1991 by the case of a poultry worker who developed an overpowering and thus far incurable body odor after pricking his finger while cleaning a chicken bone. The cause is an unidentified bacteria which has resisted every known antibiotic. No one knows how or when it could spread. Scarier is the emergence in Britain of a new strain of antibiotic-resistant salmonella, typhurium DT104, which could kill far more humans than BSE ever will. From 1993 to 1995, the number of known cases in humans tripled, to 3,500. It has now been discovered on more than 1,800 British farms. Australia in August 1996 suspended the use of Avoparcin, an antibiotic administered to poultry to reduce feed consumption, after it was tentatively linked to the discovery of eight cases of Vancomycin-resistant enterococcus in humans. Avoparcin is not used in U.S. poultry production, but many other antibiotics also in the tetracycline class are used. Ironically, even vegetarianism can't totally protect anyone against the supermicrobes. They can attack through the air, the water, the soil, or the most fleeting touch. But a healthier diet may better equip one to resist them. BST and clenbuterol Antibiotics are scarcely the only problematic drugs routinely used in animal agriculture. After nearly 20 years of study, the Food and Drug Administration Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee on November 20, 1996 ratified conclusions that there should be no human health impacts from the increasing use of bovine somatotropin (BST) to stimulate dairy cows to produce more milk. That ended the longest and most intense federal review of any veterinary drug to date. The major controversies over BST now pertain to attempts in several states to require labeling of milk produced with the use of the drug, and the economic impact on farmers, as fewer cows are needed each year to produce the U.S. milk supply. While public attention fixated on the cows, the national leaders in the business of making veal of the calves born in order get the cows to give milk in the first place quietly made routine use of clenbuterol, a banned synthetic steroid, which when mixed into feed enables virtually immobilized crated calves to put on muscle weight without getting exercise that might make their meat tougher. The side effects on people who ingest clenbuterol residues can be deadly. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| As ANIMAL PEOPLE reported in December 1995, an informant tipped the Food and Drug Administration off to the illegal clenbuterol traffic in 1989, but serious federal investigation didn't start until February 1994, after an outbreak of clenbuterol poisoning afflicted at least 140 people who ate contaminated veal and calf's liver in an unrelated case in Spain. Even then, U.S authorities proceeded gingerly, as investigating agents cooperated with the American Veal Association to keep illegal clenbuterol use by vealers out of the headlines. Raids on U.S. veal feed distributors and veal production facilities were quietly conducted throughout 1994. The first criminal indictments were announced in 1995, and Jannes "John" Doppenberg, president of Vitek Supply Corporation, was convicted of related charges in June 1996. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy ChromTech | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| On January 21,
1997, Doppenberg was sentenced to serve 44 months in a federal penitentiary and
was fined $25,000. Vitek was fined $350,000. Doppenberg, Vitek, and Vitek office
manager Sherry Steffen were found jointly liable for making restitution of
$705,814 to the Swissland Packing Co., of Ashkum, Illinois, which was obliged to
kill and burn 1,300 veal calves whose Vitek feed contained clenbuterol. Meanwhile, prodded for two years by the Humane Farming Association, the Department of Justice on November 21, 1996 began efforts to extradite Gerard P. Hoogendijk, owner of Pricor, B.V., the Dutch-based parent firm to Vitek, to face six counts of drug smuggling and two counts of introducing an illegal drug into interstate commerce. Related indictments were issued against the Provimi Veal Corporation, the largest veal distributor in the U.S.; Travis Calf Milk Inc. and company president Gerald R. Travis; and VIV Inc., also known as Hying America, along with company operators Jan Van Den Hengel and Hennie Van Den Hengle. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The significance of the indictments is not only that clenbuterol use went unchecked for many years, but further that the persons involved in the traffic were all closely associated, both personally and professionally, with Aat Groenvelt, the Dutch immigrant to the U.S. who in 1962 founded the Provimi veal empire, introduced the practice of immobilizing calves in veal crates to North America, and also developed the market for "milk-fed spring lamb," a euphemism for lambs raised in close confinement like veal calves. The corruption went right to the core of the industry. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph of veal calf courtesy the Humane Farming Association | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Clenbuterol use by
vealers is not only criminal but indeed a lucrative branch of international
organized crime. The extent of the criminality began to emerge from evidence
gathered during 82 separate raids on Belgian veterinary facilities after
European Union animal health inspector Karel Van Noppen was asassinated on the
job while probing the then little known "hormone mafia" on February
20, 1995. The same sources involved in the Belgian traffic are believed to be
the major suppliers to the U.S. Other sectors of the meat industry meanwhile discovered clenbuterol––including youthful county fair competitors, whose painstaking care of individual animals, the antithesis of factory farming, is considered so essential to maintaining the wholesome image the meat industry covets that meatpacking companies routinely bid the prices of prize-winning animals into the tens of thousands of dollars. Between 1993 and 1995, at least 18 award-winning competitors at six of the most presitigious livestock shows in the U.S. were caught illegally using clenbuterol. Sustainability Beyond all the health, safety, pollution, cruelty, and labor issues is the question of sustainability––bluntly, the question of which humans and animals will live, and which die, victims of starvation, habitat loss, and desperate fighting over remnants of food and territory. The global human population is approaching six billion, up by a third in 20 years––but that actually represents a slowing growth rate. This could be reason for hope that unrelieved famine might be relegated to history, despite present famines in parts of Africa and North Korea. Already most famines are associated with the use of food as a weapon of war. "If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet and no food were wasted, current world food production would theoretically feed 10 billion people, more than the projected population for the year 2050," the Washington D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau and Worldwatch Institute jointly reported in March 1997. But recent gains in food production are not going to feed the hungry. Instead, ever greater shares of grain output are diverted to feed more meat to those who can afford it.
A similar trend is evident in India, where despite millenia of religious and philosophical teaching against meat within the predominant Hindu culture, broiler hen production is growing at 15% per year. Egg production in India is up fivefold, to 26 billion per year, since 1968. Similar gains are reported in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Global red meat consumption has held steady since 1976 at about 50 pounds per person, says the Poultry Industry Association, while poultry consumption has doubled, reaching 18 pounds per person. The Poultry Industry Association projects current world poultry consumption at 53 million metric tons––and expects it to double by 2030. Perhaps demand could go that high. Biotechnology may be able to continue to produce bigger, faster-growing birds and mammals, who more efficiently convert grain protein and water into meat. Biotechnology may also be able to achieve further gains in grain yield per cultivated acre. Yet a basic law of biology is that achieving caloric output requires investing greater caloric input. That means meat industry growth must be sustained by an ever-growing investment of land, topsoil, soil nutrients, water, labor, and energy. Some of the required input is perhaps obtainable in near-infinite supply, albeit at a price: more humans means more available labor, more water could be had at cost of more energy expenditure on pumping and desalinizing, and how much energy humanity may expend is limited in practical terms only by the extent to which we are willing to deal with the lethal waste generated by nuclear reactors. Losing ground Other input is limited, for instance the amount of arable land. There may still be considerable room for both more efficiently farming the Russian steppes, and reclaiming desert as crop land. Otherwise, while the world has tripled output per cultivated acre since 1965, the amount of land under cultivation is still at 5.8 million square miles, just as it was then, as increases in some regions are offset by losses to drought, desertification, development, and warfare in others. Multiplying the growth in meat consumption by the growth in human population has already brought unprecedentedly heavy demand on the global grain supply. As Brown noted, the world harvested more grain in 1996 than ever before, yet global grain reserves fell to 246 million tons, enough to feed everyone on earth for just 51 days. This was the lowest per capita rate of grain saving on record. Even the Pharoahs of ancient Egypt stored more, proportionately, with domestication of the desert cat as their sole advance in biotechnology. Indeed, the recent increase in U.S. meat consumption is already reflective of diminishing resources. For nearly two decades now, the U.S. trend has been away from consumption of ruminants, or grazing animals, toward more consumption of poultry and hogs, who require much less grain and energy investment per pound of meat. The longterm trend of declining U.S. per capita red meat consumption was reversed during the past two years. The University of Georgia Extension Service recently projected that U.S. per capita red meat consumption will rise to 217 pounds in 1997, a 2.5% increase over 1995. But this also results from diminishing resources, as rising grain prices occasioned by tightening supplies forced an unusually large number of beef and pork producers to liquidate, causing a temporary surge in meat availability that brought plunging red meat prices and a consequent demand surge. By January 1997, even hay cost 50% more than a year earlier in drought-stricken Colorado and parts of Nebraska. National Cattlemen's Beef Association spokesperson Dan Kniffen acknowledged that the slaughter price of cattle was down as much as 75%. Beef demand is expected to subside as the slaughter glut diminishes, either because the grain supply recovers or ranchers run low on cattle to sell, enabling supermarket prices to float back toward their previous level. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Beside ecological and economic reality, exporting meat demand seems at best short-sighted. Backyard poultry and pork production enjoys some success in raising nutritional standards and generating income for women in parts of South Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which have no grain shortages and no commercial poultry or pork operations of significant scale. |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| However, if demand
for the output of the backyard producers becomes too strong, commercial growers
will outcompete them, not only for customers but even more importantly in
bidding on grain. As the wealthier part of each society eats more meat, the poor
will find it harder not only to buy the grain to feed livestock, but also––in
time––to buy enough grain to feed themselves.
Seemingly altruistic Heifer Project International efforts to increase meat consumption in grain-starved North Korea could even be described as unintentionally wicked. The Heifer Project, supported chiefly by U.S. religious congregations, announced in February 1997 that it intends to send goats, chickens, and cattle to North Korea, because, as Heifer Project Asia/South Pacific director Robert Pelant explained, "Poultry feeds off bugs, and the goats and cattle are ruminants." Supposedly, the poultry and ruminants will convert insects and grass, which humans find inedible, into meat, eggs, and milk. This begs the question of what will sustain the insects and grass. The first Heifer Project animals might forage enough insects and incidental grass and other browse to get by, but long before they breed up to sufficient numbers to significantly contribute to the North Korean diet, it will become necessary to supplement their foraged meals with regular grain rations, in a nation where the per capita food allowance through the winter of 1996-1997 was as little as 20% of the amount needed to maintain human body weight. The catastrophic effect of encouraging hungry nations to develop meat production infrastructure they cannot afford was meanwhile horrendously evident in Romania. As elsewhere in eastern Europe, Romanians under Communism measured their poverty by meat scarcity. When Communism fell in late December 1989, the new Romanian government encouraged farmers to rapidly expand pig production by maintaining subsidies on feed grain. But Romanian government revenue was not sufficient to keep the subsidies indefinitely. On January 1, 1997, a new government dropped the grain subsidies, hoping Romanians would pay enough more for pork to sustain the industry. Instead, government advisor Adrian Ionescu acknowledged in late March, pork sales crashed. As many as 400,000 pigs were abandoned to starve. Even opening and nearly exhausting the Romanian state granary apparently couldn't prevent the manufactured disaster. Merchants of death But neither charity nor revamping existing meat infrastructure are among the primary foreign goals of U.S. agribusiness. What U.S. agribusiness wants is to clone itself abroad, especially in Asia. Explains Dennis Avery, director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute: "Asia is now in the first stages of the biggest surge in farm export demand the world will ever see. It is also the last big surge in farm export demand the world will ever see. Asia is the land of opportunity, and it's happening fast. China's meat demand is rising by four million tons per year––but it has a feed shortage. India is trying to consume an additional two million tons of milk per year––but it has a feed shortage. Indonesia's broiler flock soared 25% last year to 750 million birds––but it has a feed shortage." Avery argues that the U.S. grain export sector must bear the brunt of the need to increase global grain production 300% within the next 50 years, and that this is a positive, since it brings immense opportunity for profit. The alternative, he contends, is that much wildlife habitat abroad will be destroyed to faciliate additional grain cropping. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Avery's calculations may stand up, if, for instance, Russians start eating the 70 pounds of chicken apiece per year that Americans consume on average, instead of their present average of 15 pounds apiece. The catch is that the necessary water and topsoil may not be available. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photograph courtesy Tyson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Scrambling for
position, agribusiness seems inclined to win market share now and figure out how
to fill it later. Exporting $700 million worth of chicken per year, accounting
for 12% of the company gross, Tyson grabbed the lead on May 1, 1997, announcing
a deal with Kerry Holdings Ltd., part of the Hong Kong-based Kuok Group, to
build up to 10 poultry complexes in China, each of which is to kill half a
million birds per week. Construction of the first complex is to begin by
February 1998. Tyson is already selling breeding chickens abroad through a
subsidiary, Cobb-Vantress Inc., which has distributors in 14 nations.
Cobb-Vantress chickens have an edge in the marketplace, achieved through
selective breeding, in that they gain one pound of body weight per 1.8 pounds of
feed input, compared to the former industry standard of one pound gained per 2.1
pounds of feed input. Earlier in 1997, Tyson announced it would invest $25 million in building a feed-and-hog complex at Luzon, the Philippines, and together with Hudson Foods and Simmons Foods announced a joint deal, partially financed by the USDA, to build a U.S.-style poultry facility in Russia. Since the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Russian poultry inventories have dropped 45% and annual production is down 55%, but U.S. poultry exports to Russia climbed 26% in 1996, to 853,000 metric tons, worth $826 million, of which the Tyson share is $170 million. Hudson Foods is the next biggest poultry exporter to Russia, selling $132 million worth last year. But the export boom, at least in chicken as opposed to grain, is not going to last. The real rush is to establish production capacity within the purchasing nations. Further, since Russia has considerable unrealized grain production capacity, unlike the other purchasing nations, industry analysts see potential huge profits not only in developing the Russian poultry industry, but also in using Russian grain to produce poultry for export to Asia. The major obstacles to global conquest by the American meat trade seem to be health and safety standards, often stricter abroad than in the U.S., but negotiated down when U.S. economic clout is brought to bear. The U.S. position, encouraged by agribusiness, is that the stricter foreign standards are not really necessary, not enforced against domestic producers, and are deployed only as defacto protective tariffs by foreign governments, on behalf of inefficient domestic producers. The U.S. won agreement from a World Trade Organization tribunal on May 12, when the three judges unanimously ruled that the European Union ban on the import of beef grown with the use of synthetic steroids is a defacto tariff, not soundly based on science. Because the provisions of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs bar nations from using "process standards" that govern how an item shall be made to restrict imports, health and safety standards remain almost the only way for GATT member nations to slow displacement of peasant farmers by "vertically integrated" agribusiness–– and at that, the U.S. can and does retaliate, with the advantage of leverage because every other trading nation wants the chance to export goods into the U.S. marketplace. ––Merritt Clifton | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||