Hog Wild

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Hog Wild

 

By Holly Dressel, YES! Magazine

March 9, 2004

 

The word has been spreading across Europe, Canada and the U.S. about the truly

horrifying damage that accompanies the hog industry, and today, doors are

starting to slam shut on mega-hog barns all around the world. Rural communities

that found themselves with their property values halved, their asthma rates

tripled, and their watercourses destroyed formed local organizations to defend

themselves against incursions by more big hog barns. Then they warned others,

spreading the word near and far about the dangers of industrial hog farms and

about the alternatives – - sustainably raised pork and farms that raise truly

happy hogs.

 

 

 

In Canada, the industrial hog barns are still on the move, particularly on the

prairies. But back East, with eight major Quebec rivers contaminated by hog

wastes, property values destroyed in what used to be the one of most beautiful

rural regions of the province, and asthma rates rising rapidly in a country

where medical bills are paid by government taxes, the province is finally

cooling its 15-year love affair with the hog industry.

 

 

 

Quebec has paid a high price for its hog industry, the largest in North America.

The province provided such generous " insurance " and other subsidies and tax

incentives to industrial hog farms that the producers barely needed to sell the

pork to make a profit. The industry itself so infiltrated the single farmers'

union, the Union des Producteurs Agricoles, that many came to see it as more a

tool of corporate interests than a voice for local farmers on these issues.

 

 

 

Quebec's situation became especially serious as the prime, hog-growing

territories were overrun and the industry began to invade formerly hog-free

areas, like the rich, dairy and apple-growing valley east of Montreal, where

agricultural run-off will threaten the city's water, or the northern Gaspe area,

home to boreal forest, salmon, whales, and an important tourist industry.

 

 

 

The groups that formed to fight back began on the village level, then spread

throughout whole valleys. Local leaders quickly got in touch with similar

organizations in French-speaking New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as well as

France's long-established and powerful agricultural union, the Union Paysanne.

As the industry brought despair to communities in the neighboring Maritimes and

west through the Canadian prairies, more rural activists made contact with each

other.

 

 

 

Today, a coalition of these groups, called Beyond Factory Farming, headquartered

in Saskatchewan, works closely with national groups like the Sierra Club of

Canada and the Council of Canadians, and with U.S.-based groups such as the

Grace Factory Farm Project and the WaterKeepers' Alliance. Together, they share

scientific and legal information, trade ideas on effective strategies and raise

funds. The province's new attitude towards hogs grew directly out of this local,

national and international grassroots networking.

 

 

 

Changing Attitudes

 

 

 

Not surprisingly, this popular uprising against industrial hog farms is being

felt by policy makers. Hundreds of people regularly show up at provincial

environmental review hearings to express their views of the hog industry and the

role of government in protecting and subsidizing an industry they believe is

damaging water quality, property values and peace of mind. Quebec's Bureau

d'Audience Publiques sur l'Environnement (BAPE) commissions, charged with

conducting such hearings, recommended revolutionary legislative reforms

affecting not only the pork industry, but all provincial agriculture.

 

 

 

According to their recommendations, " Producers must now pay attention to the

natural ecosystems pre-existing in the watershed where their operation is

located, " Romeo Bouchard reported recently in the Journal of the Union Paysanne.

" They must answer to local government, which, for its part, must effectively

manage its territory for multiple and not single uses, not the least of which is

general public health. "

 

 

 

So far, Quebec's newly elected government has agreed to all the major points

brought up by the BAPE Commission on hog farming. In addition to extending a

pre-existing 18-month moratorium on new hog barns for another year, it has

warned that the moratorium won't be lifted until studies have established norms

to protect soil and water, and until municipalities are able to take over

control of the industry. Most importantly, the provincial health and environment

ministries will now have as much to say about hog farms as the formerly

all-powerful provincial agricultural ministry.

 

 

 

Although the provincial government has not publicly commented on many other BAPE

recommendations, the commission showed itself ahead of the latest cases of mad

cow disease by demanding that the government prohibit the use of meat and bone

meal as feed for pigs, ban the use of antibiotics as growth enhancers, and

institute a system of traceability for pork. They also encouraged the pork

industry to take note of emerging consumer concerns about animal well-being and

genetically modified foods.

 

 

 

These recommendations, too, inspired and energized groups across North America

and Europe still fighting for local rights over mega-industries. It raises the

bar on everyone's demands, and has given hope to some of the most beleaguered

communities in the western U.S. and Canada. Today, a distant community's

triumphs, as well as its defeats and disasters, are no longer a secret. A web of

communications now makes a victory thousands of miles away into a new pattern

for everyone.

 

 

 

Holly Dressel is co-author with David Suzuki of 'From Naked Ape to Superspecies'

and 'Good News for a Change: Hope for a Troubled Planet.' She is also a YES!

contributing editor.

 

 

 

Reprinted from YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, PO Box 10818, Bainbridge

Island, WA 98110. Subscriptions: 800/937-4451 Web: www.yesmagazine.org.

 

 

 

 

 

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