Smithfield’s Documentation and La Gloria: Examining NAFTA's Impact on the Relationship Between a Transnational Corporation and a Mexican Town.
(source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_69u2CK25Cas/SfjeYACoY4I/AAAAAAAAKhE/E6s_5N_IlQk/s400/Granjas+Carroll.jpg)
Another way to assess the significance of the H1N1 outbreak is to frame it in what is called the "epidemiology of inequality", which means to “examine how inequalities across a wide range of scales come together as a form of structural violence that is in turn both embedded in local public health responses and embodied in personal experiences of the disease” (Sparke 727). We can start doing this by taking a look at the map above and observing the close distance between Granjas Carroll and the town of La Gloria. Next we need to understand that the distance between La Gloria and Mexico City is a few hours away also. Finally, we need to conceptualize how close the city is to other major cities in the United States to properly understand how might a disease may spread from the waste produced by a hog farm that is owned by a company in North Carolina. Let us begin understanding globalization and its effects on disease outbreak in a localized relationship.
The first victim of the swine flu virus was a young boy in La Gloria, a Mexican village with 3000 inhabitants, near the pork processing operation of Granjas Carrol, a subsidiary owned by Smithfield Foods located in the Veracruz-Puebla borderlands. While Smithfield Foods the largest hog and pork producer in the world, it is notorious for having a record for environmental violations before coming into Mexico, with examples like the 1997 $12.6 million fine for the violation of the Clean Water Act.
When NAFTA went into effect in 1994, there were many investment incentives for companies like Smithfield Foods to relocate operations there. Thus, Smithfield established the Perote operations with the Mexican agrobusiness AMSA (Agroindustrias Unidas de México S.A. de C.V.). In 1999 it bought the U.S. company Carroll’s Foods for $500 million and began rapid expansion of its operations in Perote.In this "race to the bottom", companies like Smithfield had their operations based in areas (most notably outside the U.S) so that they would deal with lower levels of environmental and health restrictions.
"The waste is for the Mexicans, the meat for the Americans"- Smithfield's Impact on the People of La Gloria
On December 3, 2009, the Swiss Television station TSR aired a documentary called H1N1: Why Did it Strike the Mexicans First? about the emergence of H1N1 in Mexico and the role played by factory pig farms in the pandemic through interviews with villagers, government officials, doctors and scientists.
In the investigation, the people of La Gloria did not want to speak in front of the cameras for fears of the consequences. The company has intimidated the community with death threats and beatings.Residents of the community of La Gloria have long protested unsanitary conditions, thick clouds of flies, unrelenting odors, and groundwater contamination allegedly coming from the factory farm. In response, the state governments of Veracruz and Puebla have slapped protesters with legal charges and sent in the police to arrest them. It also exposes the collusion of the Mexican government with the industry and shows how nothing has been done to protect the affected communities.
In the video, the villagers shows the bins that are filled with discarded pigs. As a villager reveals, “The gas and ammonia from the pig urine make the air unbreathable.” Part of the liquid evaporates, but the rest go into the soil, meaning that the waste actually goes into the land that the villages live in.
The waste and its aftermath simply became embedded within the life of the people in La Gloria. There were documentations of villagers suffering from severe respiratory infections, often bronchial-pneumonias; pharyngitis, and other problems. As long as these atypical respiratory diseases remained within these villages, nobody cared. Footage shows piles of dead pigs which are dumped in pits and left to rot. It shows the threat of these ‘farms’ to the Mexican workers health and to local residents lives through the contamination and poisoning of the air and water.
Pig farms such as these, the film reveals, house 90,000-100,000 pigs and in an area roughly the size of Switzerland the number of pigs reaches unbelievable amounts of 5 to 6 million. In the documentary, Octavio Rosas Landa, Professor of Economics at UNAM stated that a pig generates 8 times the excrement of a human, making the waste in the region around 40 million people- twice the size of the population of Mexico City.
From La Gloria to Mexico City: Consequences of Disease Spread
Another contextual point is that the flu viruses that are constantly reforming being in high density areas made fragile by food and air quality concerns. As stated in the film around the 41 minute mark, “Mexico City produces 30 million tones of garbage every day. The garbage sits in the open air, next to homes where people are constantly breathing in the toxic fumes. The residues and liquids circulate freely over there, where the people live, which weakens the immune system. So many different factors that have to be taken into account. When reading this passage along with the imagery in the film at that point, we must also place blame on neoliberal globalization and its impact on human health. People living in the city--and in a way the city itself--suffer from a depressed immunological system. Especially for the poor, the lack of public services, water and health services, stress and poor nutrition means that people die not only from increased contagion but also from low defenses here.
Discussion Questions
- When looking at the documentary of H1N1 (link below), what are some of the most interesting points / visuals of the film to you? Why? How are they related to the argument at hand?
- Summarize the different ways in which the swine flu outbreak emerged in La Gloria. Which points seem more striking to you- the lack of quality healthcare, or the oppressive conditions in which the people lived with?
- What is the significance of the medical authorities dropping the term "swine flu"? How is this important, given the fact that the US pork industry did this? Would you say that swine flu would still be appropriate to use in this case?
Additional Resources
Investigative Documentary of H1N1: http://blip.tv/grainorg/h1n1-why-did-it-strike-the-mexicans-first-by-t%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision-suisse-romande-tsr-3081652
Wired Magazine article on the genetic lineage of the H1N1 swine flu can be connected back to 1998 in U.S factory farms: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/swineflufarm/
Works Cited
Kahn, Carrie, and Marisa Penaloza. "Mexican Pig Farming Town Under The Microscope."NPR. NPR, 2009.
Web. 13 July 2013. <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103698986>.
Matthew Sparke and Dimitar Anguelov, 2012, "H1N1, Globalization and the Epidemiology of Inequality," Health and Place, 18, 726–73
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