Manure lagoons flooded and breached, pouring out their toxic contents during Hurricane Floyd in 1999--19 years ago. This happened during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and it's happened numerous times on smaller scales in the years between these disasters. "We know we have lowlands," an environmentalist told the New Yorker. "We know it floods. If there's a lagoon anywhere near a river, it's a potential flood victim."
The environmental and health dangers these industrial pig farms pose have been scientifically demonstrated and are well known. Numerous lawsuits have been filed, exposures published, and protests held against their operations. The disproportionate impact they have on people of color has widely been recognized as environmental racism, and also exposed, litigated, and protested.
Yet no significant changes have taken place, and this danger has not been eliminated. Why?
Because instead of humanity being in control of its food supply, competing blocs of capitalist-imperialists are. This means that questions of health, sustainability, humaneness and ending national oppression are such a distant second to profit that they're barely in the race.
This ruthless competition to maximize returns and strategic advantage is what's driven the growth of North Carolina's massive factory pig farms--greatly heightening their destructive impact on the environment.
During the 1990s, there was a major restructuring of hog farming in North Carolina. Large-scale factory "farms" replaced smaller-scale, less-profitable pig farms which were more sustainable and humane in their treatment of the animals. Those farms which didn't convert to factory scale and equipment couldn't compete and were largely bought out or went under. During this period, the number of farms dropped from 23,000 to 8,000, but the number of hogs nearly tripled. Locating on cheap, flood-prone land was one driver of the pork industry's profitability.
Today, Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pig and pork producer with $15 billion dollars in yearly sales, dominates North Carolina's industry. Smithfield owns 200 farms outright and has over half of the state's 2,200 pig farms under contract to raise its hogs.
It is technologically possible to solve one dimension of this environmental nightmare--ending the use of hog manure lagoons. Waste treatment systems have been developed, including one called Terra Blue, which safely processes hog waste without the lagoons. One member of the Waterkeeper Alliance told the New Yorker, "The solids are sold as fertilizer. The liquids are reprocessed. But Smithfield and its farms won't adopt the technology, and we end up with these rivers of hog waste."
Why not? The director of renewables at Smithfield told the New Yorker the company had found no new technology that "met the criteria for operational and economic feasibility"--in other words profitability. "The Terra Blue is workable and permissible," one North Carolina state scientist specializing in the field told the magazine. But, "From a management standpoint, it's relatively complex...A farm would either have to spend a lot of time operating and maintaining that, or hiring somebody else to do that for him, which plays into the economics of it."
And the capitalists calculate it's cheaper to let the hog waste cesspools spill over than to invest in the technology to clean their sh*t, as it were, up. "Those cleanup and response costs are borne by the general public," this scientist noted. "The cost for the waste-treatment system is borne by the farmer."
One Smithfield executive also justified their inaction by calling Florence "a thousand-year storm event," and another added "with a thousand-year storm, it's hard to plan."7 In reality it's been scientifically established that Hurricanes like Florence and Matthew are no longer events that happen once in a thousand years, but with increasing frequency and intensity. But Smithfield, driven by the expand-or-die logic of capitalism-imperialism is forced to invoke climate change denial and lie, to justify their compulsion to continue to foul the environment in order to stay on top.
This is yet another telling example of why this system can't be reformed, but must be overthrown through revolution in order to even begin to protect the environment and peoples' health.
How Revolutionary Society Would Take on the Challenge of Producing Food in Non-Exploitative, Environmentally Sustainable, and Humane Ways
The kind of heartbreaking--and literally foul--environmental poisoning and assault on peoples' health caused by capitalist hog farms is utterly UNNECESSARY! It could--and would--be handled in a radically different way in a revolutionary society aiming for a communist world free of all exploitation and oppression, as concretely laid out in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (hereafter referred to as CNSRNA), authored by Bob Avakian.
The revolutionary overthrow of today's dog-eat-dog system, which has proven totally incapable of producing food in a safe, sustainable, humane way, and the establishment of a new state based on the CNSRNA would break the grip the capitalist-imperialists have on every facet of life--including food production--and open up whole new, liberating, environmentally sustainable possibilities.
As we mentioned in Part I of this series, state ownership and control of the major means of production--factories, transport networks, land, resources, etc.--would become the primary form of economic ownership.8 Economic development would be centrally planned while giving great scope to local initiative, and guided by three overall criteria:
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