It is almost trite these days to point out that Trump’s Republican party is engaged in Orwellian doublespeak, but what is unique about this morning’s “Roundtable to discuss the threat that nuisance lawsuits pose to the U.S. agriculture industry, rural America, and farm families nationwide,” in Raleigh N.C. — attended by North Carolina Senator Thom Tills, North Carolina Congressman David Rouzer and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway — is that it doesn’t just perpetuate a lie; it reveals how the lies coming from Trump’s GOP suppress the power of local communities and, especially, marginalize disenfranchised communities of color.
The Roundtable is in response to a series of successful nuisance suits, where, so far, three North Carolina juries have found the pork giant Smithfield guilty of violating its responsibility to its neighbors. The third verdict, which came down literally as Senator Tillis was addressing the “Roundtable,” held that Smithfield had imposed millions of dollars of damages onto its neighbors.
Nuisance actions are older than the Republic and stand for the basic principle that we all have to be good neighbors. A person’s right to use their property doesn’t allow them to prevent their neighbor from using their own property. And if someone behaves in such un-neighborly manner, they need to stop and they owe their neighbors compensation.
The trials reveal that although Smithfield pulled in $14 billion in revenue in 2015, it did not protect its neighbors from its industrial operations. The first trial concerned a factory farm where Smithfield packed 15,000 hogs into a facility, never to see the light of day. That number of animals produces more waste some American cities.
Unable to manage that waste, Smithfield literally created geysers of manure, pretending that the shit lands on the small surrounding agricultural fields and is taken up as fertilizer. Of course, that’s not the case. Instead, it flies for miles around the community, trapping the residents indoors. That, in turn, brings “swarms of flies, buzzards and gnats.”
Clouds of manure and swarms of pests are more than just disgusting; they are established health hazards. A 2006 survey of North Carolina schoolchildren correlated rates of wheezing to the children’s proximity to hog operations like Smithfield’s. A 2005 study of residents near industrial hog operations in North Carolina found increased rates of respiratory problems. Research also indicates that neighbors of industrial hog operations are more likely to be exposed to antibiotic resistant bacteria.
As a result, Smithfield imposes huge costs on its neighbors and all North Carolina taxpayers. The Research Triangle Institute reported that the health effects (including deaths) caused just by the ammonia released by industrial hog operation results in the loss of hundreds of millions each year.
What do you do in the face of such blatant corporate misconduct? If you are a member of Trump’s Republican party, and particularly if you are Senator Tills or Congressmen Rouzer and Conaway, you lie. You claim that suits merely seeking to check the worst conduct of one of the most reckless corporations in America is attacking agriculture and farming writ large. You suggest that if a company like Smithfield — whose profits, it is worth noting, do not get reinvested in America, but get sent on to China because it is a subsidiary of China’s W.H. Group Corporation — can’t destroy its surroundings and disable its fellow citizens then the American family famer is at risk. In an entirely cynical maneuver, you also try to lump together truly independent, responsible farmers with the factories Smithfield has created in the hopes of using the former as cover for the latter.
In doing so, these hypocrites undermine true core American values. After the first verdict came down, the North Carolina Legislature, under the guise of protecting farmers, passed a bill stopping most of the states’ citizens from bringing nuisance actions against any agricultural or forestry operation. In other words, to protect this foreign business, North Carolina legislators removed individuals’ historic property rights. They undermined communities’ ability to self-regulate.
So much for believing in local control.
This also perpetuates historic disenfranchisement. As the above stories demonstrate, Smithfield is only concerned with its bottom line. As a result, it buys the cheapest land it can find, which in North Carolina (and elsewhere) is among rural communities of color.
Thus, when the North Carolina legislature, Senator Tillis, and Representatives Rouzar and Conaway talk about removing rights to protect agri-business, what they’re really talking about is further repressing the freedoms of those who have, for generations, been historically discriminated against and who are still, every day, working to right those wrongs.
The stories of those communities were erased at this morning’s roundtable. The stories we should focus on are not those about corporate profits and the dangers shareholders face when those corporations pollute their neighbors’ water and air. The stories that need to be told are those of the communities who have lived on that land for generations before the hog factories took over. The story of Julian and Charlotte Savage. The story of Elsie Herring. We all need to read the stories of how Smithfield has operated in North Carolina.
The story of the Smithfield suits and the backlash against them isn’t a story about the risks and burdens of agriculture; it is a story of how modern corporations and their political allies have used false labels to continue historic oppression and remove freedoms.
Don’t be duped. And hold your representatives accountable for these lies.
This post was co-authored by Public Justice Food Project Attorneys David Muraskin and Jessica Culpepper