The industrial meat industry says its feeding America, but it’s also feeding the COVID-19 crisis

The industrial meat industry exacts a high cost on human health under normal circumstances.

It exacts an even worse cost in a crisis. We’ve seen that in hurricanes, where cesspools of hog waste have overflowed into our public trust waterways, and we’re seeing it now as COVID-19 sweeps through slaughterhouses and processing plants.

North Carolina’s rapidly expanding industrial poultry industry, third-largest in the nation, and our industrial pork industry, No. 2 nationally, raise millions of animals in confinement in packed barns.

The pork industry stores waste from its hogs in vast open cesspools, polluting air and water. Controlling for other factors, North Carolina neighbors of these operations suffer more illnesses and live shorter lives than people elsewhere in the state.

This also takes a toll on the water we all rely on. Those cesspools pollute our state’s waterways and groundwater with bacteria, heavy metals, and nutrients. The poultry industry stores its waste in giant piles, also threatening our waterways and groundwater.

We’re seeing the industry’s disregard for our health and welfare even more glaringly in this crisis.

With outbreaks in at least 20 North Carolina poultry and pork plants in 12 counties, approximately 1,000 workers have tested positive for COVID-19. As I write this, Fayetteville, where many workers from plants in Tar Heel, St Paul’s, and Siler City live, ranked 11th in the country for the highest average daily growth rate of cases.

The industrial meat industry has argued, as the COVID-19 crisis has hit plant after plant, that it’s feeding America. But these companies are about profit, not altruism.

At least 20 workers in meat and food processing have died, and 5,000 meatpacking workers have either tested positive for the virus or were forced to self-quarantine, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (by the time you read this those number will have only gone up). That would be a hell of a cost, even if it were just to feed America.

But pork exports for the week ended April 16 were up 76,900 metric tons compared to the same week a year ago, with exports to Japan increasing by more than three-fold, even as exports to China, Mexico and Canada also rose.

The truth: Meat workers are feeding corporate meat producers’ profit margins.

And Smithfield, which dominates North Carolina’s pork industry, along with other giant meat and poultry corporations, is putting profits over people — as usual.

By failing to protect workers in its plants, these companies have exposed the communities where its slaughterhouses operate to higher risk of contracting the COVID-19. By paying “responsibility bonuses” to workers who came to work early in the pandemic, no matter how they were feeling, Smithfield hastened the spread of disease.

We see the results in the high proportion, relative to population, of cases in towns where slaughterhouses are located, such as those in South Dakota, Iowa, and North Carolina.

There are more than 150 meat processing plants operating in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting have found. Smithfield Foods closed its Sioux Falls, S.D. plant indefinitely after a COVID-19 outbreak sickened more than 1,000 people, becoming, for a time, the nation’s largest COVID-19 hot spot.

The New York Times has confirmed coronavirus clusters in more than 40 food processing facilities across the country.

“Thousands of workers and their close contacts have been infected,” The Times reported. “Those numbers are almost certainly an undercount. Some companies, including Smithfield, have refused to provide even basic information about the size of their outbreaks.”

Pres. Trump’s executive order declaring meat processing plants critical infrastructure only puts more workers — and their communities — at risk.

Workers at a Smithfield plant in Missouri said they were reluctant to cover their mouths while coughing or to clean their faces after sneezing, because that might mean missing a piece of meat as it goes by, and risking disciplinary action.

Bottom line: Smithfield and other corporate meat producers aren’t looking out for the welfare of the communities they operate in and conditions at the plants endanger all of us.

Pres. Trump’s executive order, seems, more than anything else, to be a bailout for the large corporations that dominate the meat industry. It allows them to stay open and sell their products under the guise of patriotism, even as overseas sales increase. It also may shield them from lawsuits by workers who were not provided with protective gear and adequate sick time.

This administration, which has rolled back lifesaving clean water and clean air protections, seems to prefer protecting corporations over people. Its latest move to shield industrial meat producers from accountability is a sad reminder that ordinary people may pay with their lives for these misplaced priorities.