Word: hogging
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...irony that makes Gary Muller's financial troubles that much harder to bear. If the Iowa hog farmer were to hang out at a local supermarket, he might suspect that his business was thriving as never before. After all, there's no lack of customers buying pork chops or roasts for dinner; and in spite of the Asian economic woes that devastated most American farmers in 1998, pork exports keep on growing. But while Americans pay top dollar for their hams or BLTs, Muller and the rest of America's 115,000 hog farmers may as well give their animals...
...pigs, on the other hand, can't be killed fast enough--though 2 million a week are being butchered. And therein lies the problem. Hog farming, until recently the most profitable sector in agriculture, is stuck in the mud. A glut of live pigs on the market, exacerbated by a sudden drop in slaughterhouse capacity, has pushed the price of pigs down to levels not seen since the Depression. "It's a lethal mixture," says Al Tank, CEO of the National Pork Producers Council. Across the South and Midwest, farmers are losing thousands of dollars a day, drifting deeper into...
...course, at this point, no proposed remedy--including the idea of a "gilt lift" of 300,000 sows to hurricane-ravaged Central America--may do much for the independent hog farmer. George Bailey is one of that fading breed; he owns 650 sows in Walstonburg, N.C., and unlike corporate megafarms, isn't blessed with deep pockets. In the past year Bailey has had to use most of his savings just to stay afloat, and he still racked up $35,000 in additional debt. "We're slowly going broke," he notes. "The [meat] packers are making a killing...
Bailey isn't alone in his suspicions that something more than simple market forces is at play. Many farmers have pointed the finger at their Canadian brethren for flooding the market with swine, and are urging tougher import restrictions. Meanwhile, some critics believe that a few dominant corporate hog processors, like IBP or Smithfield, have unfairly profited from the farmers' misfortunes. "This isn't a matter of outmoded hog producers falling victim to the invisible hand of the market," says Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. "Pork in the grocery store costs the same now as six months ago. An anticompetitive...
...Argentina; a winery in Bulgaria; other agricultural and business interests in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Venezuela; electric-power-generating facilities in the Dominican Republic; shipping companies in Liberia; containerized cargo vessels running between Miami and Central and South America; and, of course, the processing plant and hog farms in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Colorado, along with poultry-processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries and a network of 700 contract chicken growers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee...