PHM-Exch> The real pandemic [the global food industry]

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Vern Weitzel vern.weitzel at gmail.com

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/editor.asp?foldername=20090531&filename=Editor&sec_id=2&sid=1

The real pandemic

The influenza A(H1N1) virus is not transmitted to humans by eating pork,
that
much is now known and said. But what are the origins of this virus, winging
across our air-travel interdependent world? Why is this question never
asked?
Why are the big doctors of our world looking for a vaccine for all kinds of
influenza without checking on what makes us so susceptible to pandemics,
year
after year? Is there something more to the current contagion?

Yes. The current pandemic is linked to the way we produce food—in factory
farms,
via vertically integrated business. Experts say the global food industry,
like
the global banking industry, is too big and out of control. It needs to be
fixed.

Take swine flu—now renamed. We know it started in La Gloria, a little town
in
Mexico. We know a young boy suffering from fever in March became the first
confirmed victim of the current outbreak, which, even as I write, has
claimed
some 42 people and affected 2,371 in 24 countries. What is not said is this
ill-fated town is right next to one of Mexico’s biggest hog factories, owned
by
the world’s largest pig processor, Smithfield Foods. What is also not said
is
people in this town have repeatedly protested about water pollution,
terrible
stench and waste against the food giant.

Nothing happened then. Nothing is happening now. Smithfield has done what
all
biggies do when nearly caught: deny any wrong-doing and claim ‘their
science’
and ‘their tests’ show their herds, always kept in pristine conditions, are
just
fine. Interestingly, when The Guardian’s special correspondent, Felicity
Lawrence, wrote to Smithfield asking for test results, she got no data, only
the
usual corporate response: “These are unfounded opinions and unrestrained
internet rumours”. Simultaneously, all the food giants have ganged up to
ensure
the World Health Organization changes the name of the contagion and exhorts
people to eat more pork, manufactured in their mega-swine factories.
Business as
usual.

There is more to swine flu than the mere location of the factory near its
epicenter, suggests Lawrence. For instance, virologists at the US-based
Centre
for Disease Control (CDC) have found, after genetic fingerprinting, the
strain
of this swine flu is the same as first identified on industrial pig farms in
North Carolina. This American state has the most dense pig population in
North
America; with such a massive concentration of farm animals, it is feared,
viruses can run the evolutionary track—jumping and reassorting between
species—at unprecedented speed.

It is this toxic debt of industrial livestock farming lawyer Robert F
Kennedy
Jr, son of the legendary Kennedy, investigated to his peril. His Crimes
Against
Nature documents how the Pork Producers Council launched a smear campaign
against his organization, Waterkeeper Alliance, for their campaign to
regulate
the toxins of industrial food factories. Kennedy’s clients were the
fishermen of
Neuse river in North Carolina, who in 1991 lost their livelihood because of
fish
deaths caused by a mysterious Pfiesteria outbreak. Research led
investigators to
the hog factories: millions of litres of waste, mixed with heavy metals,
antibiotics, hormones, deadly biocides, and viruses and microbes. The power
of
the hog barons, Kennedy writes, was legendary. They ‘persuaded’ legislators
in
Missouri and Illinois to make it a crime to photograph farm animals; 13
states
introduced veggie libel laws, making it illegal to criticize food from
factories; Kennedy was personally targeted and vilified.

A decade later, in 2001, a US court ruled pig factories were no different
from
other factories that dumped waste and the US Environment Protection Agency
(EPA)
was asked to set standards. But then came the mother of all loopholes—or
rather,
why it should not surprise us Smithfield is at the centre of today’s
hog-wash.
The EPA provisions mandated a company had to get rid of its waste, but only
if
the waste belonged to it. But in the integrated food business, giants like
Smithfield own only the pig and its feed, not the waste. The contracted
farmers
who keep the Smithfield pigs own a mortgage on the hog-house and keep the
manure. EPA also did not require meat factories to monitor groundwater and
decreed their tonnes of toxic waste were not subject to the country’s Clean
Water Act.

It is the scale of this business and its power which should worry us.
Smithfield
slaughtered some 26 million pigs and had a turnover of US$ 11.4 billion in
2006.
It also made a profit of over US$ 500 million that year and expanded madly
across the world. Just last week, The New York Times published a devastating
tale of how the same company was using subsidies and public diplomacy to
take
over family pig farms in Romania and Poland.

When avian flu first hit the world, some made the same connection—intensive
poultry factories were linked to the flu the world caught. But this was an
equally inconvenient truth. It was easier to blame wild birds with no
defenders
in agribusiness, than birds produced in poultry factory farms.

The current H1N1 strain is high on the evolutionary ladder. In 1998, when
there
was an outbreak of swine flu in North Carolina, it was a triple hybrid—
containing gene segments from bird, human and swine—and this spread across
the
pig herds of the integrated world. Now it has mutated further. It is
believed,
sometime in March, a the common flu virus infecting a human being got mixed
with
the hybrid, creating an altogether new human-animal virus. This one, many
believe, is a mild version; just wait as it evolves.

If not chicken, pigs will have their revenge. And the real pandemic will
remain
untreated, as usual.

— Sunita Narain
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