Wow. Stunning. Shocking.
Two of the icons of my teenage and pre-teen days are reported dead in one day.
When I was a kid in elementary school, lots of my friends had the infamous Farrah Fawcett poster (avec naughty bits showing through her top) on their walls. I must admit I didn’t. I had a poster-target (like at a shooting range) of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s face up on my wall because 1) he seemed the embodiment of evil to my young, TV-saturated mind and I disliked him, and 2) I was afraid of my parents’ reaction if I put up a poster of a sexy lady on my wall. Anyway, if I had had the guts to put up a poster like that, it would have been that one of Cheryl Ladd. Never that crazy for Farrah Fawcett.
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And I was also never crazy for Michael Jackson’s music, although I still like Billie Jean and a couple of tracks off of his solo album that was big in 1979 or 1980, when I was in Grade 8 and he still looked like a black guy.
But it’s disturbing to think of such a giant pop god of the early 1980s dead and soon buried. Never got to make that comeback.
He needed a comeback, of course, not just because his albums of the past 20-or-so years have been kinda bad, but also because of the giant stormclouds of controversy that have swirled over him ever since people began accusing him of child molestation. There was never any direct evidence that he’d molested anyone, but some zealous prosecutors pursued him and he was pretty much tarred for life by the allegations. The allegations could have been true and perhaps he simply bought off some of the accusers with piles of money and scared off others with legions of lawyers. Or he could have been innocent of everything except stupidity and putting himself in a position that gold-digging parents willing to exploit their own kids could take advantage of. A moonwalking pot of gold at the end of a Neverland rainbow. The truth of the situation will go to the grave with Jacko and his accusers.
Why am I writing about such an utterly irrelevant topic in regards to the ag markets? There actually is a tie-in. Because my mind works in a weird, tangential way and through loops of interconnections. What I was thinking about yesterday as I drove to and from an event at a Hutterite hog barn west of Winnipeg was the damage that libels, lies and slander can do to a product, such as pork. There has been a large, rancorous and unresolved debate in journalism circles about what to call novel H1N1. At first almost everyone called it “swine flu” because it’s a version of what has often been referred to as “swine flu.” But the hog industry was quick to push the media to not use the term because its general and casual use would likely cause consumers to think pigs have it and pork could carry it. Unlike with BSE, which almost everyone outside of the ag media called “Mad Cow Disease” for years, a large portion of serious (I mean newspaper) media institutions quickly moved to H1N1 to avoid creating unnecessary misunderstandings. Others, especially broadcast media, stuck with “swine flu” because it sounds better to say on-air than a technical sounding thing like H1N1. CBC seems to use both, flipping from one to the other sometimes in the middle of a story.
But there are some who want to use the term “swine flu” not just because it’s pithy and rolls off the tongue, but because it can be used deliberately to turn off the public about pigs, pork and hog farmers. It’s like the term “tar sands” and “oil sands.” When I was a kid it was “tar sands.” And that’s what they looked like, I know from personal experience. Then there was an attempt to repackage them as the “oil sands” so that it would sound nice rather than nasty and make consumers and taxpayers feel all warm and glowy inside. But then the environmentalists began aggressively using the term “tar sands” to revive the negative connotations and turn public sentiment against that big oily patch of northern Alberta that some see as a grave environmental threat.
The hog industry has suffered more than most by this kind of labelling/marketing warfare. People who don’t like modern mainstream hog production methods call big hog barns “factory farms,” as if a factory is a bad thing. (Go tell that to some Windsor autoworkers who don’t get to work in one any longer.) And the term “industrial agriculture” is also often used by opponents of large, modern operations, as if “industrial” is a bad thing. (Anyone want to go back to the pre-industrial world?) The hog industry fights back with posters and billboards of happy, smiling hog farming families, trying to recapture the image of the “family farm,” whatever that is these days. (There aren’t too many farms anywhere that aren’t operated by a family, whether big, small, vertically integrated or completely independent, incorporated or otherwise, in my experience.)
But while “factory farm” and “industrial” are terms that turn off a small percentage of the population, they haven’t been profound enough slurs to make most people sit up and actively avoid pork or attack the hog industry. But you can tell that some hog industry haters are almost gleeful with the H1N1 outbreak and their ability now to run around saying “swine flu, swine flu, swine flu” to everyone, hoping to turn public anger for the outbreak on hog producers. This first happened in Veracruz, Mexico, where a long-simmering dispute between local residents and a major hog production facility (smell and flies were the main bones of contention) blew up into a major controversy when some of the locals blamed the outbreak of H1N1 – which was first reported in La Gloria, near the barns – on the big barns. There’s no evidence that this is where novel H1N1 came from, but people who don’t like big barns keep saying that’s where it came from.
The use of the term “swine flu” has seemed to have had a bigger effect than “factory farm” ever has. Its use caused hog prices to suddenly plunge a couple of months ago. And I’ve heard people making the leap from “swine flu” to pork on the shelves. A few weeks ago at Costco, along the meat counter I heard a man say he wanted to buy a pork loin, to which his wife said “I’m not touching that stuff now.” She said they could get sick from it.
And a neighbor of mine was appalled when she heard I was about to head off to the World Pork Expo. Wasn’t I scared of getting the “swine flu?” What if I got sick and infected my family and two little girls? This was said to me by an educated, intelligent, literate woman.
At the Hutterite barn yesterday I talked to a couple of the colony’s hog production managers and they were glum and despondent about the plight of communities like theirs which rely on pork prices and pork demand. They’re losing $20 per head. And what’s most disappointing is that they were expecting to begin making money again this summer, until the scare of novel H1N1 smashed prices down and took away what could have at least been a couple of months of profits or break-even prices. Right now the future doesn’t seem so bright.
So while the debate in media circles about what to call novel H1N1 may seem academic, and the deliberate use of the term “swine flu” by activists may just seem like old-time hardball politics, the reality of slurs and intentional misrepresentations comes home when you meet the farmers and the children who are having this knife stuck in their back.
A guy like Michael Jackso (guilty or not) had hundreds of millions of dollars to fall back on (and lots of credit from gullible lenders) and could ride out the storms of controversy and plan a worldwide victory tour when things settled down. And when he dies he gets worldwide attention and a chance to moonwalk off into eternity.
If people like these hog producers I’ve met this week get taken down by slurs and controversy – exacerbating and extending the low-price part of the cycle – there won’t be too much attention. Just more poor farmers busted out of an unforgiving business and thrown into an unsympathetic world.
