Pig Business
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…
Stan:
Feral Scholar Full Link
This article needs to be distributed everywhere, if for no other reason than Smithfield Foods has intimidated American distributors from releasing it in the US.
But it also shows the relation of food to finance internationally, and the real potential for international solidarity in resistance.
I’m going to Facebook it as soon as I put the links together.
The whole documentary is available, free, in parts on YouTube.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
3 March 2010, 10:48 amDeAnander:
Speaking of corporate censorship, it’s well worth watching the recent doco “Food Inc” for its coverage of Monsanto’s campaign of harassment and intimidation (we can’t quite call it “terror” as they don’t actually set fire to barns and blow up houses — yet) against N American farmers, attempting to enforce complete corporate Enclosure of the seed and planting cycle. Percy Schmeiser was the tip of the iceberg — he’s visible because he chose to fight. Farmer after farmer has had to “settle out of court” (i.e. knuckle under and pay “damages” to Monsanto) because no one person has the financial resources to keep up the legal battle for as long as a big transcorp can. Monsanto has a staff of 75 or so “private detectives” (Pinkerton’s men, iow) — many of them ex-cops and ex-military — skulking around soybean country (which is a heckuva lot of the N Am continent) gossiping with neighbours (humint) looking for denunciations; neighbours turn each other in for “illegal seed saving.”
Just 15 years ago no one would have believed any of this. It would have been dystopian science fiction, the ravings of alarmists, nutcases, tinfoil hatters. Now it’s biz-as-usual in the farm belt. An entire doco could be made about this one issue alone — it’s just one of several touched on in the course of “Food Inc”.
One food safety activist featured in the film declined to comment on camera about how she and family had changed their eating habits after the loss of a child to E Coli in factory hamburger. She said she felt she could not speak on-the-record about her food choices and diet plan because of the “food libel laws” which empower agribiz to sue the pants off anyone who makes disparaging remarks in public about their product. In the old days this was called lese-majeste, the prohibition about saying anything disrespectful or critical about the King and royal family. Now our King and royal family are the meat packing industry, the gene-tinkerers, the Enclosers. The new feudal overlords.
They not only want to control what you eat, and what you are allowed to know about what you eat. They want to control what you are allowed to say about what you eat.
BTW, a great deal of the feudal-overlord relation of agribiz combines and their peonified contract farmers is enforced by… debt.
3 March 2010, 11:20 amCurt:
That was a very disturbing documentary so I turned on the TV to see some pleasent European scenery and I happened to tune in to this report warning that office printers produce a fine dust of heavy metals which are to small to be filtered and will land in your lungs. They even produce nano particles which will enter your blood stream. Is this news to anyone or where you already aware of that? I for one will open a window from now on if I print more than 3 or 4 pages. Perhaps office workers should now where masks that can filter out such particles. Would that be too expensive? Disturbing, very disturbing.
3 March 2010, 2:39 pmCurt:
I loved the sound bite from the link, “Why is it when people are in bondage to a government it is called tyranny but when it is a multi-national corporation it is called effeciency.” That is a brilliant sound bite, a real sledge hammer.
3 March 2010, 4:42 pmVJP:
We should have been more attentive when Willy Nelson was trying to warn us about the loss of family farms.
And Whole Foods is selling food from China, labeled as organic, but who knows?:
5 March 2010, 11:20 amhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ31Ljd9T_Y&sns=em
Susan/catlady:
Related article at commondreams.org, Timothy Wise on the problems of globalisation of food markets, and measuring efficiency by low prices.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/05-9
Excerpt:
“What happens on the Mexican side? Well, the smaller producers are maintaining great biodiversity – both wild and in corn varieties – with low-input systems. These positive contributions go unrewarded by the market. Corn biodiversity has virtually no value in the global marketplace, yet these corn seeds are the building block for future varieties of corn: ones we will need to withstand climate change, deal with pesticide resistance, and so on. The price of Mexican corn does not reflect these contributions to the common good.
When you globalise trade, you also globalise market failure. You get under-priced US corn coming into direct competition with under-valued Mexican corn. Mexican corn loses that competition, but not because it’s less ‘efficient’. A Mexican farmer once said, “We’ve been producing corn in Mexico for 8,000 years. If we don’t have a comparative advantage in corn, where do we have a comparative advantage?” He’s right. The problem is that comparative advantage as defined by the global marketplace doesn’t value the advantage that Mexican corn offers. And in the deregulated marketplace, the only value is how cheap something is.”
5 March 2010, 4:44 pmDeAnander:
Thanks catlady, I was meaning to post that same article. An excellent overview of the “unintended consequences” (except that bankrupting peasant farmers and third world nations is imho a fully-intended consequence) of US/EU ag policy.
6 March 2010, 2:09 pm