I have attached here a pic, with thanks from the Zecker family, now/originally of Newark New Jersey, les Etats-Unis. This is a family with roots in the central/eastern European rural realities that I have loved in my travels.
But does this not look like the hog lot of many a farming enterprise in West Virginia in the mid-20th century? This pic, though, according to my (shall remain un-named) source, is "from the Slovakarainian side -- in which case, that's some mystery Hnat Havran Scerbak Kotlinszky Holodnak Hanisak Kopas child!"
Danke, I say, in deference to my Spessart region ancestors, for the photo is an engaging one, given the two subjects of the photo, the shadows that can be seen, the fence posts in the background, the rocky, swept-bare lot that surrounds both the curious hog and the crying child. The photo is engaging for a number of reasons. What prompted the photographer to take the photo? How long had the child been in the lot? Who put the child there--or was it a case of curiosity inducing the child to go exploring, and then someone quick grab a camera (a strange photo op)?
The interesting twist for my recent reality was seeing the landscape come to life again at the same time as I was reporting on some farm family health research connected to the BSE ("mad cow") situation, and then the whole of North America going into a tizzy over what was first named, then un-named, swine 'flu. The media frenzy appears, now, to have eased somewhat, but not before the less knowledgeable had to be reassured by those in the know that, no, one could NOT catch the swine flu by eating pork....
But as China halted imports from Alberta because one swine herd was confirmed as having the H1N1 virus, and Egypt set about a massive slaughtering campaign (setting off protests by that nation's farmers) the preposterous actions of those in positions of power had me thinking about the poor farmers who are (have already been) hurt by all this....
I examine these issues from the perspective of one who does this bit of farming, who grows some food and sells some food but also has a foot in the academic world, and so tries to understand what's happening as an intellectual and policy-shaper-through-research-efforts gal. And there seem to me to be a number of issues that could be raised with regard to this virus development.
Recent postings on the Organic Consumers Association home page [
http://www.organicconsumers.org/] made the immediate connection of "factory farming" to the strange mix of genetic material showing up as this virus. And so I ask: these claims of some connection are, as far as I have been able to determine, not acknowledged by those in the health community. Another tack, however, has been taken on the matter: The article, below, is making the rounds of "forwarding," and it provides some food for thought on the matter of how globalisation or NAFTA-ing may have unintended consequences for human health.
During my own travel to Mexico, the summer of 2001, I remembered being struck by how many people in Texcoco and also Mexico City were sick with respiratory ailments...at a time when it seemed illogical for this to be the case....and now, more and more, it seems, more and more of us are sick, and sick in stranger ways (my funny little episode of erythema nodosum is just one story).
How "The NAFTA Flu" Exploded
Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu
By Al Giordano
April 29, 2009
US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the "swine flu" outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified "swine flu" in February as "patient zero," five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.By April 15 - nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all - the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was "thecause of the epidemic."La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history - $12.6 million - for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But "free trade" opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the "Carroll Ranches" in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, "Agroindustrias de México."Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility - processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year - does not have a sewage treatment plant. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield's US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.The so-called "swine flu" exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.False mental constructs of borders - the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands - are taking a long overdue hit by the current "swine flu" media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.Welcome to the aftermath of "free trade." Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is "The NAFTA Flu," the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of "free trade" agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.
The author of the above raises some important questions along the way of the rant. But let's think about this in terms of re-localisation of our (any place's) food supply. How much pork do we need? Do we really want to eat anonymous bacon? I know that more and more folks are preferring to re-connect with the sources of their food, and this may mean the end to what most see as part of the problem facing farmers: 'cheap food' policy.
Then, there are the considerations of health to be thought about, as this pandemic-or-not unfolds over the next year. We are all, all of us, pushing ourselves too hard and expecting miracles from our doctors, our medical systems; operating with some ignorance of the need to consider each organism, from ruminant (cows and sheep, goats) to mammal (we pigs/people) to virus as part of the whole of existence. Can we focus on keeping healthy, eating healthily, getting sufficient sleep, avoiding stress as a way to ward off any nasty viruses? After my interesting episode this winter, I'm more convinced than ever of the power of these nasty creatures, viruses, but also of the power of simple things, like healthy food and outlook, to put the chase to them.
Greener Pastures....
The reports from my family and my farm caretaker in West Virginia are that the pastures are greening up and growing. Here, in Nova Scotia, the warm sunny few days we had followed by our rainy "spell" the past couple days has had the result of bringing out the glorious green of the lawns and my afore-mentioned buckwheat and weeds and remains of seeds in the growing patch.
This morning I chased the three persistent guinea fowl away from my now fenced-in field, then went on slug patrol, which means that I scouted around and squished as many of those interlopers to my place as I could find. I don't have much right now that they'd want, but I figured I needed to do what I could now to diminish the population so that when I do have more than perennials and cover crops growing they wouldn't be as high in numbers.
Slugs and snails present a lesson to me. I am frenetic, high energy, dash from pillar to post, most like piglet and Rabbit in Winnie-the-Pooh in my character, so that I have, in the past, dashed from thing to thing. I underestimated, until I saw how even just a few slugs could destroy a lettuce crop overnight, the power of the slow moving force....
Perhaps I'll learn, eventually, to move a bit more slowly. Get more done.
