031239 N.C. Hog Industry Still Calls Most of The Shots

The debate over the proliferation of factory-scale swine centers in North Carolina's Coastal Plain has raged for more than a dozen years now. What has been gained?

"Hog Country," Observer staff writer Greg Barnes' five-part report from the front, does much to answer the question. It also calls to mind a well-worn bit of philosophy that goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

In 1990, Smithfield Foods was about to build a slaughterhouse in Bladen County that would process a few thousand carcasses a day and employ a few hundred people. Today, that plant, the planet's largest slaughterhouse, processes hogs by the tens of thousands a day and employs thousands of people. It is part of an industry that employs tens of thousands more.

A moratorium on new and expanded hog "farms" was imposed, then extended. But Smithfield nevertheless managed to get a permit that allows it to run its Bladen plant at capacity, killing a million head a year more and, of course, discharging millions of gallons of waste water into the Cape Fear River each day.

Before 1995, the year of serial spills, the industry insisted that it was the best and most responsible of good neighbors. Post-1995 and post-Hurricane Floyd, it continues to present itself that way - and to hurl itself at every new restraint, however tentative, like a homeowner stomping cockroaches.

Then, the industry complained of "burdensome regulations" although there were none, only a requirement that each farm file a waste-management plan before 1998. Now we have buffer zones and setbacks, largely worthless protections against odor and ammonia deposition. But no one knows if producers are complying with their own permits, because the General Assembly won't fund enough inspectors to do one annual inspection at each farm. Or even half of them.

Can you make out a pattern there? Promises are made, fine words spoken. But what actually gets done, or left undone, is what the industry wants.

The industry likes its profits and the workers like their incomes and the public wants to feel confident about its waterways, its drinking water and its quality of life. Everyone understands that, and there's nothing wrong with any of it. But the public interest is still not the paramount concern of the public's elected officials, and there's plenty wrong with that.

One thing is new, and good: The controversy has created legions of new environmentalists - not the knee-jerk stereotype that people love to hate, but more of the serious-minded concerned citizens who have always done the heavy lifting.

Here's another: Smithfield and others have invested millions in research aimed at developing safe, cost-effective alternatives to open cesspools (euphemistically dubbed "lagoons" by the industry) and spray fields billed, a decade ago, as cutting-edge technology. More power to them.

There is, obviously, a tacit acknowledgment that cesspools and spray fields are not cutting-edge, after all. And if tacit admissions won't suffice, the head of N.C. State University's livestock-waste center stated it baldly: "The current system is not sustainable."

A reasonable person could conclude that public and industry have an understanding: When this is over, the cesspools go, whether the research pays off or not. Well, the industry is no more eager to pollute than the public is to drive away a billion-dollar industry and trigger an unprecedented employment crisis in Bladen, Columbus, Sampson and Duplin, to mention only the most prominent. But there is no such understanding.

If the research falls short, what's in prospect is yet another battle. And the people who are supposed to champion our cause are still snuggled up with the people from whom they're supposed to protect us.

"Hog Country" just about says it.

Source: Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

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