How China purchased a prime cut of America’s pork industry > January 24, 2015
Nathan Halverson takes us inside this major investigation of America’s pork industry.
Smithfield Foods, producer of the iconic holiday ham, was one of America’s flagship food companies, steeped in centuries of U.S. tradition.
The Virginia-based pork company derived its ham from a curing process Native Americans taught settlers five centuries ago. It owned part of Main Street in the bucolic town of Smithfield – including a restaurant, a historic Southern hotel and the company’s nearby headquarters.
C. Larry Pope, its president and CEO, had a fireplace in his sprawling executive office, which looked more like a hunting lodge than the command center for what had become America’s largest pork business.
Smithfield Foods CEO Larry Pope prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in July 2013.
Smithfield Foods CEO Larry Pope prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in July 2013. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
But in 2013, a Chinese firm bought this quintessential slice of Americana – Main Street and all. The takeover, valued at $7.1 billion, remains the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company.
Naturally, it riled patriots and protectionists. Pope’s mother asked him why he sold to the communists. Pope also had to defend himself in the local newspaper: “These are not Russian communists. They like Americans.”
Some xenophobia was to be expected. Anti-Chinese racism in America goes back nearly as far as, well, holiday ham.
But behind the usual flag waving and Red Scare antics lies a stark new reality: Chinese companies, at the urging of their government, have launched a global buying spree, a new phase in their unprecedented economic experiment. And they’re targeting a resource that climate scientists, economists, the U.S. government, even Wall Street, all forecast will become dangerously scarce in the coming decades: food.
Food is poised to become the oil of the 21st century, with scarcity and demand creating a situation ripe for wars, riots and uprisings.
“We have a situation in the world food economy today where the growth in demand is exceeding the supply,” said Lester Brown, a food economist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute.
Food – namely crops such as soy, wheat and corn from which most other food products, such as pasta, bread and livestock meat, are derived – is in dwindling abundance as the world’s population grows ever larger, adding 220,000 mouths to feed every day. At the same time, global warming is destroying up to 2 percent of the world’s crop production every decade, according to the United Nations.
“It is part of the transition from an age of surplus to one of scarcity,” Brown said.
It’s a daunting prospect for those of us expecting to be alive in 2050, when the planet’s population is projected to reach at least 9 billion. Will we be able to feed everyone? Will politicians be capable of negotiating a global solution to vital food and water supplies?
The Center for Investigative Reporting helped launch an initiative called Food for 9 Billion in 2011 that set out to answer some of these questions. As part of that effort, I spent nearly a year examining the Smithfield Foods takeover. What I learned goes far beyond pork.
The world is set for a geopolitical struggle over food.
The Chinese government already is dealing with looming food shortages within its own borders as tens of millions are eating more as they move from poverty into the middle class. The government is pushing Chinese businesses – both state-owned and privately held – to gobble up agricultural resources from around the world, including Africa, Europe and the United States.
With the Smithfield purchase, a Chinese company now owns 1 in 4 pigs raised in the U.S.
The question for U.S. lawmakers is: Did the Smithfield takeover represent business as usual for international commerce, or did it signal a concerted effort to control food supplies by one of the world’s most powerful governments?
If the Chinese government was involved in the 2013 deal, some influential U.S. lawmakers say they need to take action to protect against foreign intervention in a vital U.S. resource.
Pope, along with others who stood to benefit from the Smithfield deal, dismissed the Chinese government’s role in the takeover. The government does not control Shuanghui International or its acquisition of Smithfield Foods, they said at the time. This is simply one private company buying another.
“Shuanghui is not a state-controlled company,” Pope said in the summer of 2013, when U.S. regulators still were reviewing the deal for national security risks.
He testified to Congress that the Chinese government has no management control over Shuanghui.
That, however, is not the case.
https://revealnews.org/article/how-china-purc...-industry/
Nathan Halverson takes us inside this major investigation of America’s pork industry.
Smithfield Foods, producer of the iconic holiday ham, was one of America’s flagship food companies, steeped in centuries of U.S. tradition.
The Virginia-based pork company derived its ham from a curing process Native Americans taught settlers five centuries ago. It owned part of Main Street in the bucolic town of Smithfield – including a restaurant, a historic Southern hotel and the company’s nearby headquarters.
C. Larry Pope, its president and CEO, had a fireplace in his sprawling executive office, which looked more like a hunting lodge than the command center for what had become America’s largest pork business.
Smithfield Foods CEO Larry Pope prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in July 2013.
Smithfield Foods CEO Larry Pope prepares to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in July 2013. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
But in 2013, a Chinese firm bought this quintessential slice of Americana – Main Street and all. The takeover, valued at $7.1 billion, remains the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company.
Naturally, it riled patriots and protectionists. Pope’s mother asked him why he sold to the communists. Pope also had to defend himself in the local newspaper: “These are not Russian communists. They like Americans.”
Some xenophobia was to be expected. Anti-Chinese racism in America goes back nearly as far as, well, holiday ham.
But behind the usual flag waving and Red Scare antics lies a stark new reality: Chinese companies, at the urging of their government, have launched a global buying spree, a new phase in their unprecedented economic experiment. And they’re targeting a resource that climate scientists, economists, the U.S. government, even Wall Street, all forecast will become dangerously scarce in the coming decades: food.
Food is poised to become the oil of the 21st century, with scarcity and demand creating a situation ripe for wars, riots and uprisings.
“We have a situation in the world food economy today where the growth in demand is exceeding the supply,” said Lester Brown, a food economist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute.
Food – namely crops such as soy, wheat and corn from which most other food products, such as pasta, bread and livestock meat, are derived – is in dwindling abundance as the world’s population grows ever larger, adding 220,000 mouths to feed every day. At the same time, global warming is destroying up to 2 percent of the world’s crop production every decade, according to the United Nations.
“It is part of the transition from an age of surplus to one of scarcity,” Brown said.
It’s a daunting prospect for those of us expecting to be alive in 2050, when the planet’s population is projected to reach at least 9 billion. Will we be able to feed everyone? Will politicians be capable of negotiating a global solution to vital food and water supplies?
The Center for Investigative Reporting helped launch an initiative called Food for 9 Billion in 2011 that set out to answer some of these questions. As part of that effort, I spent nearly a year examining the Smithfield Foods takeover. What I learned goes far beyond pork.
The world is set for a geopolitical struggle over food.
The Chinese government already is dealing with looming food shortages within its own borders as tens of millions are eating more as they move from poverty into the middle class. The government is pushing Chinese businesses – both state-owned and privately held – to gobble up agricultural resources from around the world, including Africa, Europe and the United States.
With the Smithfield purchase, a Chinese company now owns 1 in 4 pigs raised in the U.S.
The question for U.S. lawmakers is: Did the Smithfield takeover represent business as usual for international commerce, or did it signal a concerted effort to control food supplies by one of the world’s most powerful governments?
If the Chinese government was involved in the 2013 deal, some influential U.S. lawmakers say they need to take action to protect against foreign intervention in a vital U.S. resource.
Pope, along with others who stood to benefit from the Smithfield deal, dismissed the Chinese government’s role in the takeover. The government does not control Shuanghui International or its acquisition of Smithfield Foods, they said at the time. This is simply one private company buying another.
“Shuanghui is not a state-controlled company,” Pope said in the summer of 2013, when U.S. regulators still were reviewing the deal for national security risks.
He testified to Congress that the Chinese government has no management control over Shuanghui.
That, however, is not the case.
https://revealnews.org/article/how-china-purc...-industry/
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