STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- North Carolina is the home of more than 2,000 large-scale hog farms, primarily clustered in the rural eastern region of the state. More than 200 of them are owned or operated by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world
- In 2013, Smithfield was sold to the WH Group, a Chinese pork conglomerate accused of feeding its hogs illegal chemicals. WH Group takes direction from the Chinese government, as “pork is considered a national-security issue in China”
- The Chinese government uses private entities as proxies for state power. In 2011, it directed Chinese companies to buy foreign food producers and farmland. Over the next two years, Chinese nationals went from owning $81 million worth of American farmland to nearly $1.4 billion
- Smithfield was an attractive acquisition because the cost of raising pork in North Carolina is about half that of raising them in China, due to lax environmental protections. In China, hog farmers must pay for wastewater treatment, digester systems to convert manure into a natural gas, and odor control systems to shield nearby residents from the stench
- In 2014, hundreds of residents filed more than two dozen lawsuits against the WH Group arguing that the hog farms “made life unbearable.” Smithfield lost the five bellwether cases and settled the remaining cases out of court. Still, while sending a message of discontent, it doesn’t change how hogs are raised in North Carolina or anywhere else in the U.S.
North Carolina is the home of more than 2,000 large-scale hog farms, primarily clustered in the rural eastern region of the state. As illustrated in the Vox video above, factory scale hog farming takes a tremendous toll on the surrounding environment, as hog excrement ends up polluting waterways, land and air.
More than 200 of these North Carolina hog farms are owned or operated by Smithfield Foods,1 the largest pork producer in the world, which in 2013 was acquired by the WH Group, a Chinese pork conglomerate that had previously been accused of feeding its hogs illegal chemicals.2
But as reported by Rolling Stone magazine in 2018, that wasn’t the only safety concern…