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Injecting Racist Hysteria

How Media Coverage of the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) Virus Raises Questions about Border Security, NAFTA, and Mexican Representation in U.S Culture

Vincent Q Pham, Author
What is Swine Flu?, page 2 of 2

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The Industry of Breeding Disease

The purpose of this page is to articulate the changes in Mexican industrial practices as a result of new economic changes brought on by NAFTA. In particular we will address GRAIN, an international non-government organization promoting sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity, and its claim that “the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.”

We first begin with an explanation of the conditions of existence that laid the foundation for swine flu to emerge out of factory farms in the first place. Before World War II, poultry and pigs were basically farmed in backyard operations across the United States. So we’re talking about poultry flocks of the size of seventy chickens. However, after the war, these independent farming operations became absorbed the control of corporations. As Wallace declares, "After the livestock revolution, poultry and pigs were now being grown and raised in much larger populations, so we go from seventy poultry now up to populations of 30,000 at a time. So we have cities of pigs and poultry."

Specifically in the case of Mexico, the company of Smithfield Foods will be examined. Here is their introduction video about their company and services. 

Right away we can identify that their motto is their claim of producing good food responsibly. As they have declared, Smithfield Foods is the largest producer of pork products in the world. That being said, how does the business proceed in a manner that matches industry standards and demands while remaining ethical? In the next video, the company highlights how the produce their food with the humane conditions. 

However, in response to Smithfield's claims of responsible farming, an undercover investigation of a Smithfield Farm reveals otherwise. [Warning: Potentially Graphic Images]


Starting at the 0:20 mark, the video features visually-disturbing images of all the pigs being squeezed in these small cages (also known as gestation crates) with no room to move except to squirm on its sides. Additionally, the loud squealing noises committed by the pigs in a chorus make for an uncomfortable experience for the viewer of this undercover video. This Webby-winning video sought to expose the animal abuses that have occurred under the supervision of companies and their "modern" farming practices that value efficiency over care. 

In the New York Times opinion piece "Breeding Bacteria on Factor Farms", Mark Bittman discusses how keeping animals in confinement (a defining feature of industrial farming) as well as feeding them antibiotics breeds "varieties of bacteria that cause disease in humans, disease that may not readily be treated by antibiotics. In short, factory farming contributes to making disease more resistant. Additionally, Bittman cites this latest study about antibiotic resistance in the journal PLoS One. In this study, a specific bacteria was closely linked to livestock was more commonly found in workers on the industrial farms, revealing a big correlation that may explain the growing tendency for diseases like H1N1 to hold genes from multiple organisms. 

Although companies like Smithfield Foods attempt to show that their food are produced ethically and safely, undercover videos have shown the true nature of industrial hog farms. These "cities of pig" hold heavy concentrations of filth, with spaces  filled with pigs that are surrounded by buzzing flies.  Instead of attempting to deal with structural change, the companies merely seek to avoid corporate economic losses that would occur from a massive die-off. In order to keep the animals long enough to slaughter them for the meat market, factory farms partake in overdosing the livestock with antibiotics.These antibiotics result in the bacteria to mutate in ways that increases human risk because the bacteria become more drug resistant, making it no surprise that disease can be spread to humans in this environment. 

 In the next section we will examine the cross section between economic incentives, Smithfield Foods, and the impact of inequality upon the overall welfare of the Mexican towns near industrial farming plants. As GRAIN documents, “Their [the people of La Gloria] voices did not register a single blip on the radar of the WHO's global emerging disease surveillance system... News only broke out haphazardly from private sources.” Not only is this a critique of the low quality of WHO surveillance, but it also reveals the power that corporations can have over large areas isolated from the public eye. Ultimately, the source asks the audience the following question: Could there be a more ideal situation for the emergence of a pandemic influenza virus than a poor rural area, full of factory farms owned by transnational corporations who care nothing for the well-being of the local people?

Discussion Questions
  1. The Smithfield Foods videos were released in this past year. Meanwhile the undercover film was released before that. Given that fact, how might have the company's videos serve as a rebuttal to those allegations?
  2. When looking at the Smithfield Foods videos, who would you say is it for? Who is the audience? 
  3. What points / statements from the company stand out the most to you? Given some of the information presented earlier in this project, how do these points compare with one another?
Additional Resources
An animated talk from the Green Society Campaign about factory farming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb_BvhkdbSg

Another animated talk from the organization AnimalsAustralia proposing a way to resist against factory farming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EsC6UtBUbA

Mexican news organization site Marcha with an article blaming Smithfield Foods for the epidemic in La Gloria: http://www.marcha.com.mx/resumen.php?id=2128#.UgrYpZKfjTZ

Works Cited

"A Food System That Kills - Swine Flu Is Meat Industry's Latest Plague." GRAIN. GRAIN, 28 Apr. 2009. Web. 13 July 2013. <http://www.grain.org/article/entries/189-a-food-system-that-kills-swine-flu-is-meat-industry-s-latest-plague>.

Bittman, Mark. "Breeding Bacteria on Factory Farms." Breeding Bacteria on Factory Farms. New York Times, 9 July 2013. Web. 13 Aug. 2013. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/breeding-bacteria-on-factory-farms/>.

Goodwin, Amy. "The "NAFTA Flu": Critics Say Swine Flu Has Roots in Forcing Poor Countries to Accept Western Agribusiness." Democracy Now! Democracy Now!, 29 Apr. 2009. Web. 13 July 2013. <http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/29/the_nafta_flu>.

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