Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.
In their book on the 1992 presidential election, political operatives James Carville and Mary Matalin showcase their ability to “spin” the media to influence press coverage of their candidates and the political process.
Spinning, they confess, is the art of manipulation. While its goal is to create positive press for your client, a good spinner often uses negativism, confusion or diversion to saw off the legs of the opponent so your guy appears taller.
In the past few weeks spinners have popped up throughout agriculture. The National Corn Growers recent claim it fought the odds to win retention of ethanol’s tax break through the year 2000 is classic spinning.
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Three weeks prior to the “victorious” compromise in Congress, however, Washington sources had the eventual deal in place: retention of the breaks, but no extension through 2007, as the NCGA desired. The Wall Street Journal reported deal as fact already in mid-July.
Iowa senator Tom Harkin griped that NCGA’s “we-beat-big-oil” spin was silly and suggested the group “get their act together.”
He added NCGA’s “victory” was hollow. “I’m not happy. Farmers shouldn’t be happy. Now we’re going to have to fight the battle again and it’s going to be harder, much harder.”
A NCGA spokesperson counter-spun Harkin’s spin by noting the ethanol compromise “wasn’t a total defeat when you look at where we started.”
OK, how about a near-total defeat?
South Dakota ag spinners have been busy since Smithfield Foods, the giant Virginia-based pork integrator and packer, offered to purchase Dakota Pork, a 7,500 hogs-per-day slaughter facility in Huron on Aug. 7. The day after the proposed deal was announced, Smithfield shuttered the plant and laid off its 850 employees indefinitely.
Smithfield spinners explained the move was necessary because there are not enough hogs in South Dakota to efficiently operate both Dakota Pork and Smithfield’s competing 17,000 hogs-per-day John Morrell plant in Sioux Falls.
What the spinners did not address, however, is that if there are not enough hogs in the state to operate two plants, why would Smithfield spend millions to acquire Dakota Pork, which, according to one source, was collapsing “like a house of cards?”
Why not let it drown in its own red ink? That would have solved the packing over-capacity problem for nothing.
One off-the-record spinner suggests Smithfield got out its chequebook in order to kill a behind-the-scenes, state-led effort to save Dakota Pork as South Dakota’s only Smithfield competitor. Smithfield’s quick grab, however, “stabbed pork producers and the state in the back,” says the source. “It was business hardball, plain and simple.”
Another explanation – this one from Smithfield management to prominent South Dakota politicians – expands the hardball analogy. Smithfield, says the source, hopes farmers, farm leaders and state politicians “regain their sanity” and fight to defeat an in-state petition drive now under way to strengthen the state’s anti-corporate farming law.
Sanity, to the Smithfield spinners in hog war states like South Dakota is either unfettered expansion and integration of the pork industry with government as a partner, not a regulator, says the source, or the packer leaves.
Smithfield has the money and market power to play this political poker. The chips are merely South Dakota farmers – this time.
“Packers are like bullies,” relates one angry farm leader-spinner. “Smithfield believes it’s bigger than state government or the people of South Dakota. They think they’re going to make our farmers bleed until we open up the state to the likes of them. We never will.”
