Swine Flu and Hogs' Industry

By Talli Nauman
Freelance Photojournalist - Mexico

The world’s largest producer of hogs and leading U.S. pork packer, Smithfield Foods, announced that its Granjas Carroll, Mexico, was free of the strain.

Swine flu can be transmitted between pigs, between people, between swine and poultry, and from people to pigs. It can not be transmitted via the meat of pork, and no evidence exists to show that pigs have caused the new strain to develop or multiply in the human population.

Yet the new strain is a combination of swine flu, with avian flu and other flu variants. Its disproportionate impact on Mexico focused the spotlights on the country’s growing number of industrial hog farming operations, known to be breeding grounds wherever they are for the spread of disease.

The world’s largest producer of hogs and leading U.S. pork packer, Smithfield Foods, announced that its Granjas Carroll subsidiary near Perote, Veracruz, Mexico, was free of the strain, according to testing done of its more than one-half million feedlot pigs and its nearly 1,000 employees there.

“Our joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct routine testing,” said Smithfield CEO C. Larry Pope.

Nevertheless, the company pledged to continue monitoring and testing for viruses at the facility, in acknowledgement of the susceptibility to virus production created by confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). One of the first confirmed cases from the new flu was a child from La Gloria, adjacent to Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, where flu symptoms ran rampant throughout April.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a statement that hogs need not be slaughtered to stem the disease, after Mexico sacrificed 900 pigs in the state of Guerrero and Egypt began to destroy its 300,000 head. The organization found that swine had been infected through contact with humans in Canada, but in any case the animals usually recovered quickly.

Following the outbreak, the FAO ordered a team of investigators to check Mexico’s feedlots. FAO Chief Veterinarian Joseph Domenech advised that the human-hog transmission possibility should be closely watched. “This was expected and FAO was already saying there was a need to do more pig surveillance,” he said.

Biosecurity measures such as quarantine of pigs at CAFOs might become necessary to prevent farm-to-farm spread of the disease where it is found, he added.

The FAO has been scrutinizing Mexico’s pig pens since as far back as 2000, when its experts launched a pork project in central Mexico to study the effects of CAFOs on the environment. This led to a carbon trading program that allowed Mexican businesses to profit on trade of carbon credits the country receives based on reductions of methane greenhouse gas emissions obtained from covering the excrement ponds at the hog lots, under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.

With an expanding population of more than 17.5 million pigs in the feedlots back then, a research project sponsored by the Montreal-based tri-national Commission for Environmental Cooperation of the North American Free Trade Agreement noted: “The proper handling of this large quantity of CAFO animal waste is critical to protecting human health and the environment.”

Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll is only one of dozens of major factory farms in states all around Mexico that is subject to examination. Sonora, Guanajuato, Nuevo Leon and Queretaro are among the big pig producing states. The production model is also prevalent nationwide in chicken and egg farming.

Mexico has been receiving carbon credits for the projects in those states since 2006. Unlike Granjas Carroll, the CAFOs in the carbon trading equation have covered effluent ponds. By covering the lagoons, the original 14 carbon reduction projects registered in the country were expected to reduceannual methane emissions by the equivalent of 621,513 tons of carbon dioxide. At the same time, the method reduces volatile organic compounds, stench, and water pollution. It also provides a renewable energy source, methane biogas.

However, critics have widely publicized CAFOs’ health and environmental drawbacks. The mass-production style of raising meat creates global warming gases, other air pollutants and pathogens by using water-based excrement handling that results in anaerobic decomposition. By contrast, family farming or small-scale production units rely on dry composting and aerobic decomposition, in which the carbon is returned to the soil and sequestered for enrichment of crop production.

Organizations promoting alternatives to CAFO proliferation, such as the non-profit U.S. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, note that animal welfare is at stake in CAFOs because the extremely close confinement typical of the facilities goes against natural instincts; prohibits exercise; encourages disease transmission; and weakens, hurts and crazes livestock. This in turn affects human welfare, because the pigs must be maintained with antibiotics and vaccinations, traces of which enter the consumers’ organisms, affect immune systems and are transmitted genetically.

Talli Nauman is a freelance photojournalist specializing in environment and development issues in the Americas. She holds a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies and an M.A. in International Journalism. You can contact her by sending an e-mail to ScienceTech@iolteam.com.