- WIECKOWICE, Poland -- The
metal hangar juts into the autumnal mist - a 21st century blot on the otherwise
medieval landscape of rural western Poland. The barbed wire and watchman
indicate a military base, but the stench and the squealing could only come
from pigs, thousands of them, packed into this corrugated iron factory.
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- The village of Wieckowice is the latest outpost in a
latter-day invasion of Poland, led by the world's largest pork production
company which threatens to destroy Europe's last bastion of traditional
farming. Moreover, it's doing so with EU money.
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- Smithfield Foods, based in Virginia, has made millions
in the US by industrialising farming, creating hog factories holding tens
of thousands of pigs. The consequences for the environment, independent
farmers and rural communities from North Carolina to Iowa have been catastrophic.
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- According to the US Senator Robert Kennedy Jnr, what
is at stake is impossible to exaggerate. "Factory farms are more dangerous
for our lifestyle and democracy than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism,"
he said. Now Smithfields has forged a bridgehead in Europe and Joseph W
Luter III, the company's chief executive, boasts that he will turn the
former communist country on the brink of full EU membership into the "Iowa
of Europe". In Iowa there are five times as many pigs as people living
in the rural state, 14 million in total, and local anger at the mega-farms
is dominating the Democratic Party primaries. They are angry for the same
reason that the windows in Wieckowice's school are never opened: the smell.
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- "The stench got so bad that they couldn't open the
windows of the school," says local activist Jurek Dusczynski. "The
bus drivers refuse to stop here." People who live near the factory
farms complain of nausea, asthma attacks and blackouts. Children at the
school village began vomiting. Activists point to US studies which they
claim show that factory farm workers and their neighbours contract lung
disease, eye infections, nosebleeds and gastro intestinal illness.
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- Hogs produce up to ten times the amount of waste as the
average human. This waste is a cocktail of up to 400 dangerous substances,
including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, and dozens of
disease-causing viruses and microbes. If this finds its way into nearby
rivers or seeps into the water table the results are dramatic. "Everywhere
this company has operated, there has been gross environmental degradation
from liquefied hog faeces," says Tom Garrett, an ecologist from Wyoming
and a long-time opponent of Smithfield who has tracked his adversary from
the pork-belt in America to Poland. In 1997, Smithfield paid $12.6m in
penalties under the US Clean Water Act.
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- The shock for Poland's traditional farmers is nothing
compared with the misery experienced by the pigs, crammed into pens often
so narrow that they cannot turn around. Noise levels can reach 95 decibels
and the ventilation system must run constantly or the animals would asphyxiate.
Overcrowding at Wieckowice this year led to the premature deaths of hundreds
of pigs whose carcasses were dumped outside until a local protest forced
a clean-up. The inheritor of a pig dynasty, Mr Luter pioneered the vertically
integrated production system, or "piglets to pork chops" as he
describes it. The company bought up thousands of farms and meat-packing
facilities and signed farmers to exclusive contracts. His farms produce
12 million nearly identical genetically engineered "superlean"
hogs annually.
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- Poland's modernisation will follow the same script as
North Carolina, the country's second largest hog producer, according to
the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international grassroots ecological organisation.
Two decades ago there were an estimated 27,000 family farms in the state.
Today, 2,200 farms remain, most of them hog factories of the kind pioneered
by Mr Luter. Employment prospects are as lean as a Smithfield pig, with
only two people needed to tend 10,000 swine.
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- A populist David to Mr Luter's corporate Goliath has
emerged in the form of Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Euro-sceptic Samoobrona
party. A tour of the mega-farms of the American Midwest was enough to convince
Mr Lepper, a former wrestler and the son of a pig farmer, that Smithfields
must be stopped. "We are not going to allow Smithfield factories to
exist in Poland, even if we have to blockade the entire country,"
he told North Carolina farmers.
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- Under Polish law it is forbidden for foreign multinationals
to buy up former state farms but Smithfield bypassed this using local front
companies. Through the wholly-owned subsidiaries Animex and Prima Farms
the $5bn (£2.96bn) US giant gained control of over 30 large, former
state farms and had already converted many of them into hog factories.
The buy-up cost $50m, despite the Polish government spending hundreds of
millions of dollars pre-sale. Mr Luter was so delighted that he told investors
he had paid just "ten cents on the dollar". Thanks to a $100m
loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD),
one of America's richest companies did not even have to pay that.
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- Robert Cyglicki, from the Polish division of the international
monitor Bankwatch, said it was a scandal that the EBRD handed out an EU-subsidised
loan with no control over how the money would be spent.
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- "Bank representatives claim that they were assured
by the borrower that the money would not used for building new industrial
hog farms but they could not dictate how the loan would be used and that's
where the money went," Mr Cyglicki told The Independent.
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- "The role of the EBRD is especially important, since
it claims to follow an environmental mandate, and its participation may
give the appearance that industrial hog businesses are not ecologically
harmful."
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=464765
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