This article was originally posted by Ken Midkiff on the Sierra Club CAFO listserv.  Erin Jordahl forwarded to the Iowa Topics list.


AGRI NEWS / MON., JANUARY 14, 2002
EDITORIAL
BY MYCHAL WILMES, MANAGING EDITOR OF AGRI NEWS


Wilmes -- Wise up to the Smithfield Foods of this generation

If you're going to lie, you might as well make it a whopper.

Adolf Hitler used the "Big Lie'' approach to great success in Nazi Germany
during the 1930s.

Unhappily, the approach remains chillingly effective today.

Smithfield Foods CEO Joseph Luter -- who has built the company into a
vertically integrated monster that processes 12 million hogs annually -- is
a highly skilled practitioner. Smithfield Foods has become a Wall Street
darling. Fat with profits, investors have sent its stock price soaring. The
company is flush with cash and it is using it to do in beef what it has
already accomplished in hogs.

There have been bumps in the road. Smithfield has a woeful environmental
record.

Luter dismissed environmentalists' complaints with the same coolness as he
pooh-poohs his firms impact on family farmers.

Luter suggests that any governmental or societal attempts to stop its
vertically integrated success would be costly to consumers. Meat quality
would deteriorate, he maintains, and family farmers would be subsidized on
the backs of unwitting consumers.

Luter chooses to ignore that his company receives millions of dollars in
indirect subsidies. Current farm policy and its reliance on
fence-row-to-fence-row grain production assures Smithfield that its feed
costs will never increase significantly. Smithfield's bottom line would
take a serious hit if it actually had to pay a price that included a profit
for grain producers.

Smithfield's success is also linked to the desire for economic development
it finds waiting in each state that wants the giant to move in. There's
nothing wrong with economic development, as long as it is sustainable. The
economic model created in Smithfield's corporate board room isn't meant to
be sustainable. Short-term goals -- an obscene profit margin -- clearly
take priority over community needs and sustainability.

Smithfield depends on consumer ignorance for continued success. It will
likely succeed if it can convince consumers that its products are better.
It helps to have millions allocated for advertising to do so. It and its
corporate brethren will succeed unless consumers awaken and tally the
social costs of allowing livestock agriculture to become nothing more than
an investment opportunity for cash-laden investors.

The Smithfields of this era receive invaluable assistance from state
economic development officials who want jobs -- no matter how low-paying --
in their communities. South Dakota state officials are only the most recent
examples of overeager policymakers who will sell out their rural
communities and environment to the highest bidder.

There are those within the agriculture community who say that the
corporates in livestock and grain should not be criticized, because farmers
need them as partners in order to prosper. There is truth in that, but
farmers need good partners. Companies have the responsibility to be good
corporate citizens. The track record indicates few are -- most have used
their money and positions of influence to squash family farmers.

Luter wouldn't be the first to get away with a "big lie.'' The hope is
consumers and the general public will catch on before it's too late and
hold the Smithfields of this era accountable for their actions.




Erin Jordahl
Director, Iowa Chapter Sierra Club
3839 Merle Hay Road, Suite 280
Des Moines, IA 50310
515-277-8868
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