The United States is the world’s second largest pork producer and pork production has been growing at quite a clip. From 2000 through 2006, US pork production expanded 15.8%. Only China, the world’s largest pork producer and consumer, grew faster. When it comes to the global pork trade, China distorts the picture only because it is so dominant. In 2006, China accounted for 48% of total world hog production.

Over the last 20 years, the number of backyard hog farms in China has gradually declined, but backyard hog operations still dominate in both the number of hog farms and share of total pork production in China. Still the trend is towards industrial hog production in what is termed a confined animal feeding operation or CAFO. Indeed, the Chinese budget for 2008-09 allocates 2.8 billion yuan from to support live pig production to build breeding farms and standard large scale piggeries. If the experience with CAFOs of the United States and now Mexico is any indication, China is unwittingly creating an environmental and health disaster. Still this is for the future, it is the present that should concern us.

Today the Mexican Health Secretary, José Ángel Córdova, reported that tests now prove that a four-year-old boy contracted swine flu in the La Gloria community of Veracruz state, where that community has been protesting pollution from a CAFO that isn’t so confined. These tests now put the start date for the swine flu epidemic at least two weeks earlier than the first death previously confirmed by the Mexican government and more importantly begins to pinpoint the start of the epidemic in La Gloria. The CAFO is run by Granjas Carroll de México which is a joint venture of Agroindustrias Unidas de México and Smithfield Foods.

It is curious but hardly surprising that in the coverage of the swine flu epidemic, the mainstream media seems to overlooking the obvious. We have another free market failure on our hands and the costs to first contain and then clean up the mess at Granjas Carroll de México is likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars while the total cost and economic disruption is likely to run into the tens of billions.

Here is how Smithfield produces (to say raise would be a misnomer) its hogs courtesy of Rolling Stone:

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

In La Gloria, residents believe the outbreak has been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll in which Smithfield has a 50% ownership stake, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak that is now threatening the globe. You would think that the New York Times might care to investigate this angle of the story. Instead we get this:

Companies that make pork products and slaughter hogs were also hurting. Hormel, the maker of Spam, and the pork producer Smithfield Foods fell after countries including Lebanon, Thailand and Indonesia imposed restrictions on pork imports, raising fears that countries would hastily build trade barriers as they rush to contain the disease.

To begin with just how much pork do Lebanon and Indonesia import given that they both Muslim countries? More serious is that China, Russia and the Philippines have temporarily banned the import of pork products from Mexico and from certain areas of the United States. And it is a fear of these bans as well as a fear that people the world over will forgo pork as result of the epidemic, even though eating pork is not the cause of the flu, that led to the drop in Smithfield’s stock price today. I wonder if the market will discount its potential liability in this worldwide epidemic and perhaps a criminal negligence for its farming practices. If there is any upside to this crisis, it is that it might perhaps our attention on our hog hells that the industry calls CAFOs.

From the Sierra Club:

What is a CAFO?

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Giant livestock operations are a growing public health threat all across the nation. These corporate-controlled units — where tens of thousands of animals are “produced” in factory-like settings — are polluting America’s water and air.

What are the health impacts of livestock factories?

Because livestock factories produce and store large quantities of animal waste in leak-prone lagoons, America’s water is at risk. A 10,000-hog operation produces as much waste in a single day as a town of 25,000 people. Manure spills, fish kills and poisoned water supplies have become a fact of life for too many rural communities. Unhealthy tap water has sickened people across the Midwest and Southeast. And when the waste from a livestock unit contaminated the water in Indiana, public health officials confirmed that it resulted in six local women experiencing miscarriages.

Livestock factories also pose a threat to our air quality. In Texas, a child went into respiratory arrest and had to be rushed to the hospital due to airborne manure from a giant cattle operation. And in Minnesota, pre-schoolers were sickened when the odor from a hog waste lagoon brought high levels of hydrogen sulfide in their classroom.

What are the environmental impacts of livestock factories?

Fish and wildlife also suffer from manure spills. Last summer, toxic algae called Pfiesteria, believed to be linked to manure from giant chicken factories, polluted the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, killing thousands of fish and sickened more than a dozen people. The Mississippi River bears the brunt of the pollution from Midwest livestock operations, and the pollutants that flow down the river to the Gulf of Mexico has contributed to a dead zone the size of New Jersey.

What are the economic impacts of livestock factories?

The huge corporations that run the livestock factories are edging out family farmers, who often use more environmentally friendly techniques. Every corporate unit replaces 10 family farmers. In other cases, small farmers enter contracting arrangements with the corporate giants, and are left shouldering the burden for the waste management. And whole communities lose when the agribusinesses don’t support Main Street merchants, preferring to buy in bulk from their own corporate headquarters.

Homeowners can be hit just as hard as businessmen. Owning a home might be the American dream, but a hog operation in the backyard is a nightmare for property values. In one Illinois county, property near the smelly operations plummeted by 30 percent in value.

Too big to fail doesn’t just apply to the banks, it also applies to pig farming. Smithfield, by the way, produces one of every four pigs in the United States.