The U.S. is quickly becoming an agricultural colony of foreign countries. China owns Smithfield, the largest pork producer; Brazilian JBS is the biggest beef company; and U.S. corn farmers are the main market for Chinese pesticide company Syngenta and German BASF and Bayer, once part of the Nazi I.G. Farben conglomerate.
What if China doesn't want to comply with bans on caging pregnant and nursing sows to sell its pork? What if Brazil doesn't like Environmental Protection Agency rules on water pollution from its factory farm feedlots? What if Chinese and German pesticide companies get caught giving people cancer or killing "off target" crops that aren't genetically engineered to withstand the toxic herbicides that drift from fields sprayed with their poisons?
These foreign companies go to Congress and demand relief in the Farm Bill! Incredibly, our members of Congress comply, writing in special provisions to exempt bad actors from rules the states and the courts are trying to enforce.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass a Farm Bill for U.S. farmers not foreign interests!
Tucked in the 2024 Farm Bill are two provisions that primarily benefit foreign companies that don't feel like complying with state laws or the rulings of U.S. courts.
The first is Sec. 10204, "Uniformity of Pesticide Labeling Requirements." That one's for Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018 and ever since has been trying to avoid compensating Roundup-exposed cancer victims who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using this toxic herbicide.
In 2020, Bayer agreed to pay roughly $10 billion in a landmark settlement, but tens of thousands of additional claims remain unresolved. Bayer is on the hook for billions of dollars more for acting with “malice, oppression or fraud” to hide the fact that Monsanto knew its glyphosate-based herbicide caused cancer.
Sec. 10204 would help Bayer escape liability by preventing the Courts from imposing any rules more strict than what the Environmental Protection Agency requires. The rub is that back in 1985 an EPA panel classified glyphosate as a Class C chemical (suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential) based on kidney tumors in male mice. Then, Monsanto barraged it with bogus research about its safety until the EPA reversed its position six years later.
The second is Sec. 12007, "Ensuring the Free Movement of Livestock-Derived Products in Interstate Commerce." This one is for China's Smithfield.
In 2018, California voters passed Proposition 12, a ballot initiative to raise the animal welfare standards of food sold in their state. They banned pork from factory farms where pregnant and nursing sows are contained in cages so small that they can't even move enough to turn around.
Sec. 12007 says that farmers, including those controlled by China's Smithfield, can raise their pigs however they like and have a right to sell their pork wherever they want no matter what state or local laws say. This is an incredibly dangerous provision. Pork farmers working for Smithfield don't get to decide how to raise their pigs, China does.
From 2018 to 2019, African Swine Fever put most Chinese pork farmers out of business. This gave the country the opportunity to rebuild pork production at a hyper-industrial scale. Prior to 1995, almost all Chinese pork came from small-scale family farms. Less than 15 years later, commercial operations producing 50 to 1,000 pigs exceeded small farms. As of 2021, small farms were down to 20 percent of pork production, with 40 percent in operations with up to 1,000 sows and the other 40 percent in mega-operations with more than 1,000 sows. By 2025, 65 percent is projected to come from the mega-operations, 30 percent from commercial operations and just 5 percent from small farms. What's being built in China today is "hog hotels." A single operation can have 21 buildings, six stories high with 660 sows each. One company is producing 30 million hogs a year this way, equal to 21 percent of U.S. pork production in 2020.
U.S. regulators should have never allowed Germany to take over the U.S. pesticide market or China to take over U.S. pork production, but the least we can do is to maintain the fundamental rights of people living in a so-called democracy to access the courts for redress of wrongs and to pass laws at the state and local level to regulate how these foreign corporations are going to operate on our soil.
Congress has to hear from us about how disturbed we are to hand over our food supply to foreign countries.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass a Farm Bill for U.S. farmers not foreign corporations!