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لنكتب أحرفا من النور، لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار

Tuesday, 02 February 2016 04:24

The Trouble with Iowa Corn, corruption, and the presidential caucuses 2/2

Written by By Richard Manning

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here is another way to process corn and soy for human consumption: feed it to animals. As a nineteenth-century observer wrote, “The hog eats the corn, and Europe eats the hog. Corn thus becomes incarnate; for what is a hog but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?” Research shows that one of the biggest sources of linoleic acid in the American diet is chicken.

Iowans have one way of saying this: they lament that their state has been “chickenized.” You could more specifically say it has been “Tysonized.” Tyson Foods prefers to describe the process as vertical integration. A few decades ago, the company began to acquire every step of the process — from producing and delivering feed and hatchlings to slaughter, processing, and distribution — while also expanding horizontally. At the same time, the company almost literally redesigned the biological unit called a chicken, genetically selecting for animals that would gobble high-energy corn and soy to fatten rapidly while crammed in windowless, climate-controlled factories. The goal was a uniform flow of chickens to retailers, especially Walmart and fast-food restaurants. (Annual per capita consumption of chicken in the United States has more than doubled since 1969.)

The process depended on a networked system of growers and farmers, who became contractors. The network was organized as a tournament. Tyson delivered hatchlings, formulated and supplied the feed and antibiotics, and took away the birds when they were ready for slaughter. The company owned every step of the process except the chicken confinements. Growers in a given region were lumped in a pool and paid on the basis of a competitive scheme that ranked them according to the pounds of chicken produced per pound of feed. Everything was tightly monitored by a flow of data that measured corn and soy in, McNuggets out. A productivity gain of a few percentage points meant the difference between bankruptcy and a paycheck for many growers — several people I met in Iowa called them “serfs.” It is an interesting extension of an ancient process. As Charles Darwin wrote, domestication is nothing more than hypercharged natural selection. Tyson’s competition for survival reformulated chickens, but it also domesticated farmers.

Pork processors, the swine capitalists, saw chicken production begin to crowd them out of markets, and so they adopted Tyson’s model. They started in North Carolina, but almost immediately Smithfield Foods brought the change to Iowa. Tyson also got into the pig business. Now Tyson and Smithfield, along with three other corporations — JBS, Cargill, and Hormel Foods — account for almost three quarters of the nation’s pork.

In Iowa, the system combines with politics in a curious little diorama displayed on the outskirts of nearly every farm town. Alongside the usual national fast-food outlets, the state harbors a homegrown chain called Pizza Ranch, which has more than 180 restaurants in the Midwest. The chain offers several forms of industrial pork and chicken embedded in a matrix of cheap carbohydrates, but also satisfies a different need: Pizza Ranch “believes in the power of prayer. If you have a specific issue that you would like us to pray for, please send it in using the form below.”

Though Democrats used to visit Pizza Ranch in earlier years, the chain is a mandatory stop for Republican presidential hopefuls. The Republican contest in Iowa is really a struggle for the evangelical vote, which has slowly accumulated in Cruz’s corner. In December, he drew the coveted endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, the state’s most politically active evangelical, which along with Steve King’s endorsement helped move Cruz past Trump in local polls. By the time of the caucuses, Cruz — and most of the other candidates — will have made multiple Pizza Ranch visits. Mike Huckabee told the Des Moines Register that he won the 2008 caucuses in large part through such visits: “We created the Pizza Ranch strategy. A lot of people have copied it since then, but I think we created it.”

This election cycle, klatches at the chain take place almost daily: a candidate in a suit (or jeans, depending on the desired optics of the day) scarfs a slice while ringed by ruddy men in ball caps, most of them obese, many of them corn growers, chicken growers, or hog growers under contract to a handful of corporations. There they speak about the problems that affect their lives, such as the coming imposition of sharia law. They also talk about the need for the federal government to “get out of the way” of free enterprise, especially their particular brand of federally subsidized free enterprise.

hris Petersen is a farmer who raises a few hundred legacy-breed hogs in old-school conditions near Clear Lake. The day I visited him, however, he wanted to show me his chickens, a flock of hens that were pecking and wandering, uncaged and un-CAFO’d. Everybody with uncaged chickens wanted to show them to me, because Iowa’s chickens had recently made national headlines. The state has the largest population of caged laying hens in the country, and about half of them died last summer from an epidemic of bird flu. There were discussions in the press about whether it was more humane to exterminate infected flocks by turning off the ventilator fans and letting the animals suffocate or by covering the birds with fire-extinguisher foam to snuff them out by the hundred thousands. The total cost to Iowa for the epidemic would finally be estimated at $1.2 billion.

The traditional farmers I met wanted to show me that none of their chickens had died of bird flu. Avoiding the epidemic, they said, was simply a matter of not raising the birds in caged conditions. All of this went unmentioned in the presidential campaign, except by Carly Fiorina, who suggested that the way to deal with the problem was to find a faster way to deliver federal payments to chicken farmers who had lost birds. Fiorina also called the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit an example of government “overreach.”

Petersen is a political animal as much as he is a hog farmer, and he has been deeply engaged with presidential politics for decades. He’s on a first-name basis with Barack Obama and both Clintons, and stumped for Al Gore and John Edwards. And yet as we talked at his dining-room table, in the modest frame house that he’s lived in most of his adult life, within walking distance of the farm his Danish-immigrant grandfather bought with the money he made digging ditches for drainage tiles, he did not speak much about the campaign. Hillary Clinton would be just a few miles south that week, but Petersen showed no excitement, perhaps because the Clintons’ political fortunes were greatly aided in the early days by Tyson money; the two Arkansas dynasties arose in parallel. Bill Clinton was Tyson’s biggest political supporter, and he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Don Tyson, the company’s former CEO. Hillary Clinton sat on the board of Walmart, the retail pipe for chickenization.

But Petersen’s disengagement likely had far more to do with something William Stowe told me: “Tom Vilsack has been a terrible disappointment.”

When Obama appointed Vilsack as agriculture secretary soon after taking office, it was a way of making good on his campaign promise to reform industrial agriculture. As governor of Iowa, Vilsack had been a supporter of reform, and as agriculture secretary he used antitrust regulation to challenge the Tyson-engineered tournament system. Tyson responded by joining with Smithfield and other meat producers to mount a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign, complete with astroturf opposition and congressional arm-twisting. Big Ag outplayed Vilsack at nearly every turn, and he quickly backpedaled on the new rules. Finally, Congress killed the reform effort late in 2011. Two years later, with the fundamentals of its business plan intact, Smithfield sold itself to the Shuanghui Group, a Chinese company. What Smithfield sold to the Chinese was less its pork production than its control of Iowa’s politics and its landscape. The irony of some of the world’s last remaining Communists taking over from Iowa’s swine capitalists is outdone only by Donald Trump, who spends whatever time he isn’t using to bash immigrants bashing the Chinese. He offers no hint, of course, about how he might best the Shuanghui Group, which, through finely honed contracts, now controls the landscape of all that beautiful corn in the Midwest.

When Rubio, Walker, and Fiorina joined Trump in railing against China, they got personal, directing their fire at China’s president, Xi Jinping. Not long afterward, Terry Branstad, Iowa’s Republican governor, who serves primarily as a shill for Big Ag and is in all other matters philosophically aligned with the Republican field, issued a statement that took exception to the seditious talk. Schooling the candidates about the realities of who owns Iowa, he said that Xi “calls us old friends, not just me but a lot of people in the state of Iowa. That’s an important trading partner, so we want to keep that relationship.”

here is no doubt that conservatives would like to win the presidency, but they don’t actually need to. We have a naïve sense that to correct wrongs in our country, we simply need to elect the right president, pass the right laws, and that’s that. Politics in a state such as Iowa, however, teaches us that laws are only the beginning of the process, the opening bell for litigation, lobbying, and defiance. Faced with a federal mandate to regulate hog manure, Branstad simply cut the budget that paid for inspectors. Likewise, he roundly criticized William Stowe, urging Des Moines Water Works to address its issues with collaboration and volunteerism.

“What we see every time we hear ‘collaboration’ is buying time, a defense for the status quo,” Stowe told me. “The status quo will ultimately bankrupt our rivers and seriously jeopardize the public health of our consumers.”

Faced with regulation that will limit the carbon emissions that are killing the planet, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, a fellow who has sworn to uphold the Constitution, urged states to violate the law. The tightly organized, cohesive network that is the American right wing has abrogated the social contract with wholesale, institutionalized civil disobedience. Want to regulate the manner in which farms pump liquid shit? Sure. Can you do it with the twenty-eight inspectors Iowa has to oversee 4,000 hog factories, the pumping on which occurs almost entirely during a few weeks in autumn, and often at night?

The standoff that results from all of this plays out across our continent. Those endeavors that produce food and energy need scale and landscape and are of necessity rural and are of necessity unspeakably destructive. The industries involved must be free to operate on their own terms in the landscape in the nation’s midsection, where the states are red and square. As Stowe says, all they have to do is to protect the status quo. To do that, they don’t need to play to checkmate; stalemate and gridlock are success enough. Iowa’s caucuses, and for that matter the whole presidential ritual, will do nothing to change this.

Link :http://harpers.org/archive/2016/02/the-trouble-with-iowa/7/

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