Uh-oh, this is not good.
American agribusiness is now fouling up the rest of the globe. The Times has run an in depth and illuminating piece about American pork giant Smithfield abusing the laws and lands of Romania. The companies talk only of dropping pork prices for the American consumer, not the environmental impact of the — in the words of Robert Wallace, a visiting professor of geography at the University of Minnesota — “livestock revolution that has created cities of pigs and chickens,” or incidents such as a swine fever (sound familiar?) that swept through the Romanian operations resulting in 67,000 hogs dying or being destroyed, “with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.”
But, says the Times story, “Smithfield’s global approach is clear”: Chairman, Joseph Luter III, has described it as moving in a “very, very big way, very, very fast.”
