(The following article is from the June 16-30, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By David Tymoshchuk, Winnipeg

      Back in 1999, I was talking to a student who spent his summer job aboard the Siggi Oliver, a Manitoba Department of Conservation vessel used to enforce fishing regulations. He told me the algae blooms were so huge he could not see where the surface of the water began on Lake Winnipeg. The boat cut its way through a green carpet, the wake the only water witnessed before it closed up again as the vessel passed. As a Green Teamer, an employee of the government summer student program, one of my duties was to clean algae off of the beaches at Hecla Island Provincial Park.
    
     It's now 2008.

     Manitoba's Bill 17 has triggered an awful howl from hog producers. Well, it's more like an orchestrated chorus, conducted by groups dominated by industrial hog barn corporations than farm families. After years of mounting evidence that Lake Winnipeg was dying, the NDP government is finally imposing a moratorium on expansion of the hog industry. 

     Investors and agribusiness are putting the pressure on to reverse the decision. The Manitoba Pork Council has spent a huge amount of money on "Unfriendly Manitoba" billboards, websites,  print ads and radio spots. Poster boys for their cause (family farmers, of course) have been put forward.

     They are trying diversion tactics, saying that city and town sewage is just as much at fault, and Bill 17 is "blaming farmers." It's the old city-country power struggle game. Urban sewage requires a separate action and bill.

     They say pork is singled out, why not cattle farmers? Cattle are still raised in the traditional sense: in the open, and manure is not liquified. Intensive beef feedlots are still thankfully few in comparison with the ballooning hog industry.

     They say "Bill 17 is anti-farm". The old saw of the supreme right to private enterprise is used yet again, even though that "right" tramples on the rights of others, destroying lakes and the commercial fishing industry, the aquifer and drinking water.

     The increased number of factory farms have wrecked havoc with the environment after the hog marketing board was abolished. Stories abound of illegal dumping of diseased hog carcasses in ditches, sewage running in rivers, and a lagoon built on a floodplain. These bad apples are beyond bad, they are rotten.

     But barns that do things by the book still add to the problem, just because of the sheer numbers, concentration and industry methods. The cramming of high numbers of hogs under one roof means diseases spread like fire. Antibiotics are added to feed as a precaution and as a growth stimulant. These clockwork-like barns are highly automated. Clocks trip a feeding system and other machinery. Enormous fans change the air frequently, or else the ammonia vapours from the manure/urine will kill the hogs. Huge amounts of freshwater are used to wash and flush manure through the grates the hogs stand on, into pits below, replacing the time honoured but labour-intensive shovelling of solid manure. The times have changed, and factory hog barns which produce industrial volumes of liquid waste must be controlled by Bill 17.

     The centralized mega-barns simply do not have the land base to distribute manure/fertilizer in a safe manner. The bigger the radius from the manure storage site, the more the time and fuel costs to spread it. This economic fact often results in fields close at hand receiving an over-application of the hog manure slurry. Over-application can result in nutrient run-off and even render the field sterile. This run-off is a big reason for the algae blooms.

     With the federal government paying $50 million to cull hogs and reduce the supply sent to market because of over-production (even though starvation is up globally), why are hog producers screaming for the right to produce more? Simple. It's a winner takes all capitalist game, where whales eat the little fish.

     I'm calling this for what it really is: this fight for the right to displace one's neighbours. For small family farms, backing these corporate spin doctors is like cheering on a big city banker who is about to foreclose.

     (David Tymoshchuk, a member of the Communist Party's Manitoba Committee, was one of those displaced small farmers. His family's farm was surrounded at least three such mega-barns within 1.5 kilometres, and the household well was declared unfit for drinking. He moved to Winnipeg.)