How China Is Destroying American Farmland

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 raised by the sale:³

“The Chinese government had a track record of using nominally private entities as proxies for state power … In 2011 … the government issued a plan directing Chinese companies to buy foreign food producers and farmland. In two years, Chinese nationals went from owning $81 million worth of American farmland to nearly $1.4 billion …

The investigative news organization Reveal uncovered documents showing that WH Group receives guidance from the government, which a company executive explained was because ‘pork is considered a national-security issue in China’ …

Part of what made the company such an attractive target is that it’s about 50% cheaper to raise hogs in North Carolina than in China. This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it’s also because of loose business and environmental regulations … which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.”

China Dumps Its Agricultural Waste in the US

In years past, the U.S. outsourced dirty industry processes to poorer countries. Today, China is doing the same, and it’s treating the U.S. as a developing nation. Granted, U.S. environmental policies — which have gotten increasingly lax over time due to regulatory capture by industry — are what allows for this “hostile takeover” in the first place.

Believe it or not, China doesn’t allow hog waste to be sprayed on fields as a means of disposal, as is routinely done here in the U.S. In China, hog farmers are forced to spend big bucks on wastewater treatment, digester systems to convert manure into a natural gas, and odor control systems to shield nearby residents from the stench.⁴

All of that makes pork about twice as expensive to produce in China than the U.S. Usha Haley, a professor at West Virginia University who has studied the Chinese takeover of American agricultural assets for well over a decade, told Rolling Stone:⁵

“China will not care about the health of people living beside the hog farms. China will act in its own self-interest to leave the pollution here but take the valuable clean pork back to China.”

One year after Smithfield was gobbled up by the WH Group, 500 residents filed more than two dozen lawsuits against the company, arguing that the hog farms “made life unbearable.”⁶

By early 2020, five of the lawsuits had gone to trial, and Smithfield lost them all. In each case, the jury unanimously concluded there had been an “unreasonable and substantial interference with the reasonable enjoyment of the [plaintiff’s] property.”⁷

In all, Chinese-owned Smithfield was ordered to pay $550 million in damages, later reduced to $98 million due to a state cap on punitive damages.⁸ According to Corporate Crime Reporter, Smithfield settled the remaining cases out of court.⁹ Still, while sending a message of discontent, it doesn’t change how hogs are raised in NC or anywhere else in the U.S.

Hog Farms Wreak Havoc

Thousands of pigs are kept permanently indoors in these industrial “farms,” known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Urine and feces are piped outside into a giant open lagoon, and when the lagoon gets full, the waste is sprayed onto nearby fields. As explained in the VOX video above:

“Spraying and lagoons have air quality risks. When bacteria breaks the waste down, it releases hundreds of compounds, like methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and dust into the air. These can cause asthma, respiratory diseases, headaches and nausea.”

Indeed, several studies have concluded that living near CAFOs has a detrimental impact on health. For example, one 2018 study by Duke University found that people living in close proximity of hog CAFOs have:¹⁰

• Higher all-cause mortality
• Higher infant mortality and low birthweight
• Higher mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis and septicemia

The massive amounts of hog waste produced by these industrial farms also pollute well water and surface water with nitrates, phosphorous and fecal bacteria, which in turn contributes to algae blooms that kill fish and can cause life-threatening illness in humans.

The largest cluster of hog farms in NC also happens to be located in a coastal floodplain, which further heightens this water pollution risk, as storm flooding washes the hog waste into the surrounding ecosystem.

Residents living near hog farms also must deal with dead hog carcasses that attract flies and buzzards. As noted by Corporate Crime Reporter,¹¹ “The cheapest way of disposing of hogs is to throw them out into the open hot air.” So, that’s what most of them do.