Everyone loves bacon, ham, pork chops and so much more from our friend the pig. With the rise in individual income in China, the Chinese are ready to go whole hog and pork out in China. In a piece written by Tom Philpott entitled, “Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China”, which was posted on the “Mother Jones” (
http://www.motherjones.com
) website May 29, 2013, reporter Philpott gives the lowdown on the rapidly growing market for all things pork in the PRC. He writes:
“The
small number of companies
that dominate global meat production is about to get smaller. The Chinese corporation Shuanghui International, already the majority shareholder of China’s largest meat producer, has just
bought
US giant Smthfield, the globe’s largest hog producer and pork packer, in a $4.7 billion cash deal. (It still has to get past Smithfield’s shareholders and the US Treasury Department’s
Committee on Foreign Investment
, which reviews takeovers of US companies.)
Now, I hope this merger of titans doesn’t provoke a xenophobic reaction. Shuanghui has
strong ties
to China’s central government, but it also
counts
Goldman Sachs among its major shareholders. And the US meat industry is already quite globalized. Back in 2009, a Brazilian giant called JBS had already barreled into the US market, and now holds
huge positions in beef, pork, and chicken
processing here. And true, as China has ramped up its food production—and rapidly
reshaped hog production on the industrial US model
—it has produced more than it share of food safety scandals, including recent ones involving hogs.
But as I have
pointed out
, the US pork industry is no prize either—it
pollutes water as a matter of course
,
hollows out the rural areas on which it alights
, relies heavily on routine antibiotic use, recently inspired a government watchdog group to lament
“egregious” violations
of food safety and animal welfare code in slaughterhouses, and uh, has an
explosive manure foam
problem.
So forget about where HQ is for the vast conglomerate that ultimately profits from running Smithfield’s factory-scale hog farms and slaughterhouses. The real question is: What does this deal telling us about the global food system and the future of food?
Reuters
offers a hint:
The thrust of the deal is to send the U.S. made pork to China, a factor that one person familiar with the matter said would help during Shuanghui’s CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment] review.
If Reuters is right that deal’s purpose is to grease the wheels of trade carrying US hogs to China and its enormous domestic pork market, then we’re looking at the further expansion of factory-scale swine farming here in the US: all of the festering troubles I listed above, intensified. For Smithfield itself, the deal is savvy, because Americans are eating less meat. In order to maintain endless profit growth, the company needs to conquer markets where per capita meat consumption is growing fast, and the China market itself represents the globe’s biggest prize in that regard.
As for China, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed in a blockbuster 2011
report
, the central government strived for years for self-sufficiency in pork, even as demand for it exploded, by rapidly industrializing production along the model pioneered by Smithfield. By essentially buying Smithfield, the government may be throwing in the towel—saying, essentially, let’s just offshore our hog production, or at least a huge part of it, to the US.
In an ironic twist, China appears to be taking advantage of tax,
environmental
, and
labor
standards in the US to supply its citizens with something it can’t get enough of, Industrial pork: the iPhone’s culinary mirror image.”
Ham hocks, rice and beans; the table is set and millions of chopsticks are at the ready. Let the pig out begin!
Hawkeye in China
Lex Smith