Smithfield Threatens Documentary makers Over ‘Pig Business”

A documentary about Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations-CAFO’s due to be shown this coming Sunday at the Guardian Hay festival in London England is facing legal action by the company it criticizes, Smithfield Foods.

Smithfield denies its alleged responsibility for environmental pollution and health problems among residents near its factories.

The film was due to be broadcast on Channel 4 in February but was cancelled because of legal fears. A planned screening at the Frontline Club in London earlier this year was also called off.

Each cancellation emboldens Smithfield to keep fighting to keep it from the public. Residents near the factories could come forward and either validate or discredit the film.

Pig Business shows the cramped conditions in which pigs are reared, similar to those of battery hens, and claims that waste is inadequately disposed off, leaking into the surrounding environment.

Filmmaker Tracy Worcester, pictured here, interviewed people who live near Smithfield farms in the US, where the company started out, who complain of health problems including asthma and digestive illnesses, and fishermen who report that stocks have been destroyed.

The film documents the company's move to Poland, where locals claim to experience similar health problems.

Worcester, who spent four years making the film, said: "It's crucial that consumers are able to watch this so they know what is being done to their food."

Smithfield's poor environmental record was documented in Felicity Lawrence's book Eat Your Heart Out, where she notes that the company was fined $12.6m for illegally discharging pollutants into the Pagan river in Virginia. There is no reason to believe the company ‘cleaned up its ways’.

Since Smithfield is fighting this so arduously, there is probably some truth to what the documentary is trying to get out to us. The funny thing, those of us who have followed CAFO’s already now how damaging they are to our environment. So why is Smithfield fighting so hard to keep it from us? They think the general public is too easily swayed by whatever someone puts in front of them. They don’t give the public credit for thinking for themselves.

The thing Smithfield needs to learn is that the internet can spread the truth without any of their lawyers interfering.

Facts about CAFO’s:
Facts about CAFOs, Local Control, and Health Ordinances
Facts about CAFOs by Sierra Club, Michigan Chapter
CAFOs – Economics, emotion and passion

Photo credit: Guardian News and Media Limited

17 Arrested in West Virginia Protesting Mountaintop Mining

Protesters left a banner on top of 7 billion gallons of toxic waste and were fined for littering. The irony of this is over the top.

We think nothing of flipping a switch to light our homes, to turn on a computer, or a TV, or keep food in a refrigerator. We pay our electrical bill and think nothing of it. These people are paying for our convenience with more than money.

They live downstream from a dam holding back billions of gallons of toxic sludge. The fear they live with day and night worrying when that dam will break must be overwhelming.

I wonder, if we were to trade places with these people and let them flip an electrical switch for the sake of convenience, what they would think of us protesting against what coal companies are doing to our surroundings, to our homes, to our sanity.

Remember, all their protests are falling on deaf ears at every level of government. Their representatives turn their backs on them and have them arrested for exercising their right to protest.

Protest photo by Chris Irwin, Margaret Killjoy

Obama gives biofuels the big thumbs up

clipped from www.whitehouse.gov President Obama announced steps to further his Administration’s commitment to advance biofuels research and commercialization a Biofuels Interagency Working Group, to be co-chaired by the Secretaries of Agriculture and Energy and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency This Working Group will work with the National Science and Technology Council's Biomass Research and Development Board in undertaking its work Develop the nation’s first comprehensive biofuel market development program The President also announced that $786.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be provided to accelerate advanced biofuels research and development and expand commercialization by providing additional funding for commercial biorefineries The new categories include: Cellulosic biofuels; Biomass-based diesel; Advanced biofuels; and Total renewable fuel.

On the surface this may seem like a good idea, but the mandate to, by 2022, have up to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol counted toward the 36 billion gallon biofuel production level will only worsen its effect on food production. We’re at 6-9 billion gallons of corn ethanol now and with all the havoc that has wreaked on agriculture worldwide, the concept of almost tripling that amount over the next 20-odd years is terrifying. What may yet save us is the fact that it will likely prove a simply impossible standard to meet.

And the fact that the administration’s rationale for expanding the use of biofuels continues to be the misplaced desire “to reduce our dependence on foreign oil” is just ludicrous. Addressing climate change WILL reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But simply reducing dependence on foreign oil won’t save the planet—only zeroing out our carbon emissions will do that. So energy policy in this country must be seen through that one, single lens.

Hog Giant Smithfield Transforms Eastern Europe

clipped from www.nytimes.com Smithfield Foods. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage. The upheaval in the hog farm belts of Poland and Romania, the two largest E.U. members in Eastern Europe, ranks among the Continent’s biggest agricultural transformations. Smithfield’s global approach is clear Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania, tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths

The Virginia-based pork giant has squashed small-scale hog farming in Romania and Poland, just as it did in the United States in the 1990s.

Smithfield says pork prices dropped by about one-fifth, saving consumers about $29 per year. While this is good news for us, farmers are run out of business forced to seek employment elsewhere and the new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are creating vast open disease ridden cesspools. Unbearable stenches, and wrecked communities.

They used high-level cronyism to move through the maze of the Romanian political system.

This is a prime example of the poisonous downside of corporate globalization.

Cheaper More Efficient Solar Tech

clipped from www.popsci.com The next frontier in traditional solar panels is concentrators - devices, usually lenses, that concentrate solar power onto the most expensive part of a solar panel - the silicon. Skyline Solar's "solar trough" design concentrates sunlight without using expensive lenses or complicated robotic armatures for tracking the sun as it crosses the sky. The entire system is built from commodity parts in an effort to make it cheap and scalable – the ultimate goal being 'grid parity,' or a system that is competitive with fossil fuels as a means of generating electricity. That's why the Department of Energy gave Skyline a $3 million grant as part of its Solar Energy Technologies Program. (Investors have plunked down another $25 million.)

Next evolutionary step in solar panels. Anything that increases efficiency and lowers costs is alright in my book.

These things will be everywhere within the next couple of years.