Big Meat Flexes Its Muscles
Which global corporations are controlling the organization and forced implementation of the 'held in secret' negotiations for the TPP (trans pacific partnership)? It's becoming glaringly clear that the Big Agri global corporations are behind the curtains looking to expand their markets regardless of the environmental destruction their practices create. This is a corporate global grab of increasingly scarce natural resources of water, land and cheap labor.
note: This is in response to bobswern's excellent diary here
The big meat corporations issued an ultimatum to Japan this summer: either drop different tariffs on all agriculture products or you should be kicked out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).1 The threat, coming from the dairy, pork, wheat and rice industries based in the U.S., represented the seriousness of what’s at stake for global agribusiness—and particularly the big meat corporations—in potentially the largest free trade agreement ever negotiated.
The TPP has been called "NAFTA on steroids" for good reason. It includes the NAFTA countries (U.S., Mexico and Canada), as well as nine other Pacific Rim countries (Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru and Singapore). For global agribusiness, most with operations and connections in multiple TPP countries, the goal is simple: lower tariffs and weaken regulations that support farmers, consumers and rural communities in order to increase exports and imports. As the global meat and dairy trade grows—and the percentage of U.S. production for export rises—the ongoing TPP negotiations have become even more critical to these corporations’ bottom line.
How's that for controlling the agenda?
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
The handful of big meat and poultry companies driving factory-style production in the U.S. do not consider themselves U.S. companies. They are global corporations, some with foreign parent companies, operating in multiple TPP countries. An alarmingly few companies control the U.S. protein market (as the industry refers to it). They are all global players operating in multiple sectors and multiple countries, including: JBS USA (beef, pork and poultry), Cargill (beef, feed), Tyson Foods (poultry, beef), Shuanghui/Smithfield (pork).
If the meat companies get their way in TPP, rising exports from the U.S. could shift into overdrive. This means there will be more CAFOs in U.S. rural communities, more land needed for animal feed (yes, more corn and soybeans), more antibiotics used to raise these animals, and more water and air pollution from their giant manure lagoons. The agreement would also both expand and lock in a system of contract farming, where pork and poultry farmers take the risk, and the companies take the profits.
The scope of the secret new trade agreements is unprecedented. They aspire to corporate control of every aspect of our lives and with their
disregard for environmental protections they will control our very survival.