by Kurt Michael Friese
Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was
playing chess?
That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries.
Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system;
on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it,
the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy.
That’s how it’s gone with the British 2009
documentary film Pig Business. I
watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it
hasn’t been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought
upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film’s main villain,
Smithfield Foods. The world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million
pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12
billion. The UK’s Channel 4 ran the film last
summer despite four
letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film’s release here, it
has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate
censorship.
Smithfield does, in one sense, have
cause for concern: this film certainly doesn’t show their company in
the most favorable light. Right off the bat, the viewer is struck with
some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated,
apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear
from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie
to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. An owner
of a small family farm in Poland who this
large corporation has pushed out of business says, “I don’t
know whether I should retire, hang myself, or leave the country.”
Watch the trailer:
In the early ‘90s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers in Poland. Today
there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by
Smithfield Foods. Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms
with two to three minimum-wage jobs. Smithfield accountants and shareholders might laud the boost to the company’s bottom line, but one protester in the film asks a different question:
Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it
is called “tyranny,” but when the oppressor is a multinational
corporation, it is called “efficiency?”
It was precisely this form
of “efficiency” that the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when
he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot
make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys
on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”
Smithfield is not the only corporate specimen under Worcester’s microscope; she takes large financial
institutions to task as well. In an interview with noted Belgian
economist Bernard
Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in
absolutely everything—making one-third of all political contributions in the
United States (a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the
Supreme Court’s recent decision). Big Money’s influence, along with that of
many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope
of laws throughout the U.S. and the world. My daddy used to call this the
Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
That influence
is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to
mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair. As Pig
Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the
damages they cause, to the environment and to human health, then any small
farmer in the world could out-compete them. But they don’t, because the
game is rigged.
So most of the time, agribusiness will take its
profits and steam obliviously onward. But if anyone points out that the wreckage these companies leave in their wakes, they have scads of lawyers and PR
professionals to make certain no one hears. Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.
Watch Part One of Pig Business >
A version of this post appeared on CivilEats.com.
Related Links:
Study suggests junk food taxes may beat healthy food subsidies
Food as America’s newest religion
Chef Jamie Oliver takes on the American school lunchroom in his new show
