posted on 2009-12-27 by JPerez

This is a classic example of a very obvious health and environmental issue that keep persisting throughout human evolution and in particular starting with industrial food revolution. And the head scratching question is why any of the government agencies have not done anything about it.

Of course most of us know why. It is politics and the power of money in its purest form. It’s always been that way. To understand what makes it difficult to tackle this type of social and political injustice you must already understand the fundamental of politics; who controls and what affects the law and legislations from the start.

The more I understand the mechanism of this type of political whirlpool, the more I believe that this whole thing takes up a life of its own, that the players of the game no longer recognize human value while they are sucked into it. There is no longer the existence of “right or wrong” nor human morality. It’s now merely a game of power, competition, and, most importantly, wining the game of “domination”, no matter what it takes.

Please read below…

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The Trouble With Smithfield: A Corporate Profile

www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Excerpt from the executive summary:

Four corporations control 66 percent of the U.S. hog market, as of 2007.1 At the top of this list is Smithfield Foods, which slaughters 27 million hogs every year, making it the biggest hog producer and processor in the United States and world–wide.2 For Smithfield, this means sales of $11 billion a year,3 but for farmers, consumers, workers, and the environment, this concentration in agriculture has been anything but a success story.

Smithfield controls virtually all aspects of pork production and processing.4 Its hogs are raised on factory farms where hundreds or thousands of pigs are crammed into large warehouse–like barns.

Each hog produces three times more excrement than a human, creating serious environmental and human health issues. The 500,000 hogs at one Smithfield subsidiary in Utah create eight times more waste than the Salt Lake City metro area, the state’s biggest city. The waste is stored in enormous lagoons that can overflow, polluting water and land. In North Carolina, millions of gallons of waste from Smithfield’s lagoons have contaminated rivers and creeks.

Continue to source: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/pubs/reports/smithfield-foods