[health-vn] The real pandemic [the global food industry]

[Vern Weitzel]

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