Pig Business (Completed )

About the Film

Three years ago seasoned campaigner and mother of three, Tracy Worcester, decided to find out what was in the cheap processed pork products for sale in Britain’s supermarkets. Her journey led to America and Poland where she found huge, industrial scale, pig farms.

Tracy has now shot over 100 hours of footage of her investigative journey. She has spoken to workers, local small-scale pig farmers and government officials in America and Poland. And what she has discovered is that Polish people’s livelihoods and consumer health have been put at risk, that the pigs are treated badly and that the products from these pig factories are to be found on our supermarket shelves.

It turned out that the owner of 20 of these giant pig factories in Poland is an American company called Smithfield Foods, the biggest hog producer and processor in the world, whose production methods have been heavily criticized not least by lawyer, Robert Kennedy Jnr,, president of the Waterkeepers Alliance,who has won numerous court cases against Smithfield Foods for violating pollution laws.
Complaints of poor quality food are summed up by a Polish deputy Mayor, “people know that the meat from pig factories is bullshit”.
To keep the pigs alive in intensive conditions, former workers admit that they pump the animals with antibiotics. Richard Young, policy adviser to the Soil Association, says that the antibiotic residues in pork are making consumers resistant to antibiotic treatment and creating new forms of super-bug like the pig strain of MRSA that has recently passed to humans in the UK.
A local doctor confirms that the employees and neighbors are poisoned by the stench due to the vast quantity of effluent from units of up to 30,000 pigs. “The microclimate, a cocktail of 400 gasses inside the shed, restricts the airways”. One villagers says she is, “more sick from the odors than from her chemotherapy” - a foul stench of poisonous odors pumped out of the sheds, putrefying in slurry lagoons and sprayed on neighboring fields.
Local farmers say they also pay with their livelihoods as foreign factory farms flood the market with cheap pork.
Landless rural workers say that they would have liked to buy land once owned by the communist state but it is only available to the “monopolistic’ foreign giants”.
We follow Robert Kennedy Jnr, as he arrives in Poland to continue his battle against corporate industrialized agriculture. At a demonstration outside a Smithfield farm in Poland, he explains, "they cannot produce a pig cheaper than a traditional family farmer without breaking the law". Several Americans speak of the destruction of their economy, health, environment, and community due to the collusion between government and giant food industries.
Kennedy explains, "what Smithfield does is makes itself rich by making everyone else poor. And it does this by corrupting government officials, capturing monopoly control and eliminating competition and free markets"
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EU subsides are given to the giants in the name of helping Poland become more competitive within the EU. Tom Garrett, from Animal welfare Institute in America, says that Smithfield Foods of America, the largest pork producer in the world with an $11 billion annual turnover, came to Poland funded by taxpayers’ money and “benefited from a $100 million loan facilitated by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).”
Small-scale farmer, Alicia, complains that the giants out compete her traditional farming methods, “as they give their animals antibiotics and hormones to grow faster and collect huge checks from the EU”.
The drive to consolidate farms is driven by EU development policies like those espoused by EU Commission head of Polish development, Manfred Beschel. “People are being set free from farming as it is getting more productive and people will not be able to work there anymore”.
Bernard Lietar, former investment banker, sees banks as the driving force behind the present day development pattern, “I would compare the money system, as a ring that we put through our nose, and it leads us where it wants to go”.
The Polish Minister for Agriculture assures us that they are preparing laws to curb the negative impact of these foreign giants. However, the government fell and none have been introduced.
With democracy in question, Tracy decides that it is up to consumers to choose whether to buy ‘cheap’ Polish pork in the UK supermarkets or reconnect with a farmer you trust. She and her family visit the local farmers market, local independent pig farmers, and community supported agricultural initiatives that provide viable alternatives to cheaply sourced supermarket products.