Gość: Robert F. Kennedy
IP: *.neoplus.adsl.tpnet.pl
28.04.06, 23:46
POLES, DEFEND YOUR PIGS, DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY! (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland
October, 2003)
I am President of Waterkeeper Alliance an environmental group and a leader of
a national coalition of family farmers, fishermen, environmental and animal
welfare organizations, religious and civic associations, and food safety
advocates who are fighting Smithfield Foods in the United States. During the
past eighteen months, I have come to Poland twice to alert the Polish people
about the dangers of allowing Smithfield a foothold in this country, most
recently at the request of the Animal Welfare Institute.
Smithfield is one of a handful of large multinationals who are transforming
global meat production from a traditional farm enterprise to factory style
industrial production. Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world
and controls almost 30% of the U.S. pork market. Smithfield’s style of
industrial pork production is now a major source of air pollution and
probably the largest source of water pollution in America. Smithfield and
its cronies have driven tens of thousands of family farmers off the land,
shattered rural communities, poisoned thousands of miles of American
waterways, killed billions of fish, put thousands of fishermen out of work,
sickened rural residents and treated hundreds of millions of farm animals
with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.
Four years ago, in 1999, Smithfield began buying slaughterhouses and state
farms in Poland. On July 22nd of this year, I sat in the crowded Senate
Conference Room in the Polish Republic’s Senate Building in Warsaw listening
as Smithfield’s Vice President Gregg Schmidt promised the senate agricultural
committee that Smithfield will “modernize” Polish agriculture and bring
prosperity and jobs to rural communities.
For the past two decades, Smithfield Foods and its allies have made identical
promises to the people of North Carolina, one of America’s rural states.
After listening to these promises, the state Senate passed laws to make it
much easier for Smithfield to do business in North Carolina.
With encouragement from these politicians, Smithfield built the largest
slaughterhouse in the world in Bladen County North Carolina. The plant
butchers 30,000 pigs each day. By building this pig slaughter plant,
Smithfield set off explosive growth of a new way of producing hogs in North
Carolina
