IATP Hog Report - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Section 0
i. Executive Summary
Section Summaries:
Are Independent Farmers
an Endangered Species?
Putting Lives in Peril
Building Sewerless Cities
Part of the Pig Really
Does Fly
Hog Factory in the Back
Yard
Pigs in the Poky
Stop the Madness!
References
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Executive Summary and Overview
The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs
The industrialization of U.S. animal agriculture has pressed on, unabated,
for half a century, gradually changing the faces of American farming and
rural communities. The changes wrought by industrialization are occurring
in all of animal agriculture. This report focuses on the impacts of hog
factories.
The industrialization of hog farming has been attributed in great part to
inexorable advances in science and technology and the freedom afforded
economic development by an unfettered marketplace. Indeed, some
experts see current industry structure as simply "what has evolved out of
the marketplace," 1 the inevitable result of impersonal, irresistible
economic forces triggering a kind of "natural selection" process over
which we are powerless to do anything but go with the flow.
Writing about mega-hog factory Seaboard Corporation's move to
Guymon, Oklahoma, however, authors from the North Central Regional
Center for Rural Development note that the move was hardly due to
market forces at work. Describing the over $60 million in publicly
supported incentives that drew Seaboard to Guymon and helped it build its
facilities and train its workers, they note: 2
Guymon is a case of state-directed, rather than marketdriven
introduction of new economic activity.
The chink in the armor of the natural selection theory is that the
industrialization process is not impersonal or natural or necessary. It, too,
has been engineered. Says rural sociologist Doug Constance: 3
It is very importantthat we do not accept the
industrialization process, the industrialization of
agriculture, as something natural, as something inevitable,
as something determined. It is no such thing. It is a plan. It
is a plan for certain people to benefit and others to pay.
The industrialization of hog farming has taken place in a politicaleconomic
environment or context in which the quality of natural
resources, the quality of human and animal life, the safety and quality of
our food, and the quality of life for future generations are valued lower
than short-term economic gain.
http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/sec0.html (1 of 11)2/27/2006 3:50:00 AM