Dead Pigs Flood Shanghai: How did that happen?

Workers are pulling thousands of dead pigs out of the Huangpu River that runs through Shanghai. Eartags on the deceased swine indicate that they are from neighboring Zhejiang Province, though the cause of death is not yet known.

Source:http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/767158.shtml#.UT3DatHkJ_k

Is this a China problem? Or is this a problem of industrial pig farming?

In the cramped and stifling  quarters of a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation), genetically identical pigs die because they’re sick and/or stressed, and because the genetic diversity that would otherwise confer some level of disease resistance on the population has been replaced by homogeneity in search of so-called production efficiencies.  Dead pigs are common to all industrial production, all across the globe. Consider that in the United States, industrial swine farms have an average 3% mortality rate. That means that for a 10,000 head finishing operation, each year, 300 dead pigs have to be disposed of. And that’s just one farm, in a regular season, without a disease outbreak!

Disposal practices in the US include burying carcasses on-farm, incinerating them, taking them to rendering plants (of which there are only a few that accept dead animals), or composting them. Composting is the so-called “sustainable” solution to industrial hog mortality. After all, composting creates a nutrient-rich product that can be incorporated into soils surrounding the pig farm, feeding the next corn crop.

Except that “nutrients”  coming out of the CAFO  in the form of manure are already in excess of what the soils surrounding the pig farm can absorb. Industrial pig farming transforms manure from a resource to a waste management nightmare to a serious pollution problem to dead zones to…you get the picture. There’s simply too much. Too much phosphorus, too much nitrogen, TOO MUCH.

So composting dead pigs to make “fertilizer” isn’t all that sustainable. It’s excess, just like the system itself produces excess — phosphorus, CO2,meat, calories, corporate concentration…

The dead pigs in the Huangpu likely succumbed to a viral outbreak, which because industrial pig farming is practiced using “improved” pig breeds that are genetically identical (and by the way, are the very same pigs we produce in the United States), easily wipes out hundreds or thousands of animals in one go. This incident is not the result of production mismanagement by Chinese farmers, although this is the analysis we’ll no doubt see in the Western press (and dumping infected swine carcasses in rivers is surely its own special form of mismanagement, but that’s a different issue). We’ll also see the industry in the US come out and say that we don’t have dead pigs in our rivers, and we’ve got this dead pig disposal thing nailed down. But they’ll be wrong about that, and both will miss the point.

INDUSTRIAL PIG FARMING IS THE PROBLEM, NOT JUST CHINA’S VERSION OF IT.

Pigs and Pollution in The Guardian

Nicola Davison at The Guardian wrote a very good piece on the relationship between industrial pig farming and the challenges it creates for rural livelihoods in China. Read it here:

China’s taste for pork serves up a pollution problem.

(I’m also quoted in the article, talking about meat and modernity and pork price.)

Piglets at a farm in Suining, Sichuan province. Chinese people are eating four times as much pork as in 1980. Photograph: View China Photo/Rex Features

Demand is a Construct…so let’s demand something REAL!

Economistic thinking is the default setting for understanding how the world works. Perhaps nothing illustrates this more than the theory of supply and demand. From hedge fund managers, to professors of economics and business and psychology and plant breeding, to policy makers and analysts, to students, to journalists, to grandma, to your average Joe(lene), when confronted with issues of resource distribution, supply and demand is the go-to explanation. The idea that markets simply respond to “what people want,” pricing those things based on “what is available,” might in fact be the most powerful idea shaping our world today.

But it’s an idea.

I’ll be quite forward: I don’t believe in supply and demand. I don’t think it’s a real thing, and I don’t think it’s even a good idea for organizing the allocation of resources. In relation to the hegemony of supply and demand thinking, one of the most difficult problems to arise is that we tend to mistake something that is a concept and a construct, for something that is natural, inevitable, and just “the way things are.” We reify it.

Pig Progress news from today provides a concrete example of this process: the article US: Funding to drive pork demand is a peek into the way that millions of dollars are expended to create consumer demand, and at the same time, to funnel capital to agribusiness. Demand, in other words, is a construct, with powerful forces behind every turn.

I imagine that one of the reasons we’re so keen on the idea of demand is that it makes us, as individuals, feel we have something to contribute – some power – in shaping the course of economies and societies and histories. But thinking of our engagement primarily in terms of what we do with our wallets is outrageously disempowering, and suggests more about the ways in which we’ve actually been disempowered in the course of the attempted marketization of everything.

What we buy is not who we are.

Purchases are not votes.

We are not empowered through consumption.

Understanding supply and demand as a theoretical construct has important implications, not least of which is the parallel that we should take the concept of demand and turn it into something real. I’ll start with a few ideas:

I demand a food system that isn’t controlled by corporate elites who use “food, agriculture, land” as investment categories; a food system that doesn’t make our air, water, and soil toxic; a food system that operates in a way that gives people dignity and nutrition and community; a food system that is inclusive and equal.

These demands have no price or market. We can’t buy them; we can only make them.

Food for 9 Billion China Story

The Center for Investigative Reporting, along with PBS and Homelands Productions, has been working on a series of short documentary film pieces that examine the challenges of feeding the world today. The last installment in their yearlong project, Food for 9 Billion, is a story about China and meat (watch it here). This piece aired November 13, 2012 on the NewsHour on PBS, and will be housed on the CFIR website hereafter. Mary Kay Magistad, the China Correspondent for PRI’s The World, and producer Cassandra Herrman put the China story together. They came to Ithaca in August to talk to me about pigs and meat in China, and my report, Feeding China’s Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China’s Smallholder Farmers and Food Security. They’ve done a nice job presenting a complex set of processes and relationships in the span of a 10-minute piece. I do have some issues with the analysis of food safety, which I’ll comment on very soon…

Guest Blogs: China in Transition

Since Reform and Opening in 1978, and especially in the last decade, China’s economic growth has been remarkable. With annual growth rates around 10%, analysts have marveled at the success of the country’s export-led model of development. Today, it’s unclear how long China can sustain such rapid growth, and to what extent exports should be balanced with domestic consumption. At the same time, pursuit of a robust economy is one of the primary avenues through which central and local governments claim legitimacy and justify certain sacrifices. So while researchers and policy makers try to figure out the most appropriate growth rate for continuing the headlong march towards ideas and goals of development and social stability, increasing incidents of protest — whether around degrading environments, working conditions, or political freedoms — suggest the challenges that lie ahead.

In the wake of economic growth and transition we need to also assess how the processes of modernization, industrialization, and development have been, and are being, experienced differently by different groups of people in China. We need to critically examine the environmental and human health implications of China’s export-led development model. We need to frame the idea of development itself as a contested process, and not simply a imminent, unidirectional, one-size-fits-all model the inevitably leads to improved living and working conditions for all. Furthermore, we need to understand the challenges and opportunities of ecologically sustainable and socially inclusive development in China in particular, and in the world in general.

These are some of the themes and issues we examine in my class, China in Transition. First-year students read and learn about the politics and practices of labor, environmental, agrarian, and dietary transitions in post-reform China, analyzing the actors, mechanisms, and consequences of these changes. We consider development in China from a sociological perspective that goes beyond economic measures of growth to ask questions about equity and sustainability.

Throughout the course students write about the costs and benefits of economic development as it is practiced in China today. This term, I assigned a “Writing for the Real World” essay in preparation for students’ final research projects. I asked them to find an article from the popular press that relates to themes we’ve been working on in the course, and that might be a topic for their research papers. I then asked them to write a short, cogent essay that includes a call to action for addressing the challenges they raise in the piece. With student permission, I’m sharing some of their work here, in the “real world” of Pig Penning.

Please have a look at the essays posted in the guest blogs tab. You’ll find commentary on China’s push for green energy, challenges associated with e-waste processing, the obesity epidemic, and the relationships between consumerism and environmental degradation. If you care to comment, please do so; the authors will have access to respond.

Enjoy!

Who Will Feed China?

GRAIN just released a new report called Who Will Feed China: Agribusiness or Its Own Farmers? Decisions in Beijing Echo Around the World on August 4, 2012.

Here’s the summary:

China is now the world’s largest global food market. What Chinese people eat has repercussions on everyone, because of the increasingly global reach of how and where that food is produced. When China began importing soybeans as animal feed in the late 1990s to support the growth of its factory farms, it ushered in a dramatic agricultural transformation in both China and Latin America. Now Beijing is moving down the same path with maize, its other major feed crop, and global corporations and Chinese companies are scrambling to develop and control centers of supply for this potentially huge market. The fallout is already being felt around the globe: from rural exodus in China, to farmland grabs in Africa, to food inflation in Shanghai triggered by drought in the US. China can and should reverse course by shifting away from industrial meat production to small scale livestock farming based on local sources of feed.

Photo: Reuters

China’s Other White Meat

Tom Philpott cited Feeding China’s Pigs in his article, China’s Other Sleeping Giant Is the Other White Meat, from Mother Jones, June 27, 2012.