IATP Hog Report - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Section 5
The previous Tribal Council cannot be blamed for its efforts to alleviate
Rosebud's unemployment and poverty. Tribal Councils are between a rock
and a hard place and, as will be seen below, they are not the only ones to
be persuaded by corporate hog factories' promises of economic
development and prosperity and assurances of environmental care.
A few menial jobs for tribal members have resulted from the hog factory
development so far. At what cost were these jobs obtained? Is there a more
wealth-creating, self-reliant, culturally-compatible source of economic
development for the Tribe? Ideas that have surfaced at Tribal meetings
include wind power that could take advantage of the strong prairie winds
and a credit card service agency. 87 There also may be economic potential
for the Tribe in reestablishing bison culture.
A pernicious aspect of animal factory development by outside investors in
depressed communities, particularly when it requires a substantial public
outlay of financial and other resources, is that very often the animal
factory's presence (and even its departure), as well as the money vacuum
created by the community resources its owners have consumed, effectively
precludes other kinds of major investment by that community. Further
economic development at Rosebud, for example, likely will be limited to
enterprises that will not further stress the Tribe's water allotment from the
Mni Wiconi project.
In the case of the Rosebud Farms Pork Production Facility, conditions of
the Tribe's lease with Sun Prairie, LLP, include that no livestock operation
competitive with the project be operated on the Tribe's tribal, trust, or
reservation lands or on any other lands owned or controlled by the Tribe;
that livestock operations already existing within five miles of the project's
13 sites not expand beyond their current capacity; and that no new
livestock operations shall be built or operated by the Tribe or allowed to
operate by the Tribe on its tribal, trust or reservation land, or on any other
lands owned or controlled by the Tribe within a five-mile radius of the
Project. 88 Hence, even sustainable alternatives to the hog factory are not
allowed under the lease.
In early winter, Bell delivered the first quarterly profit sharing check to the
Tribe. It was for $5,000. The Tribe turned it down. 89
Judge Kornmann's February 3, 2000, judgment overturned the decision by
the U.S. BIA headquarters to void a lease agreement improperly approved
by a local BIA office. The BIA's grounds for overturning the decision
were that the permitting and approval process violated the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and an environmental impact statement
was needed before deciding whether or not to go ahead with the project.
According to Jim Dougherty, attorney for the four citizen groups, the
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