Mungkin tidak ada yang menyangka bahwa Flu Babi adalah dampak langsung dari Perdagangan Bebas dan Jual Beli Karbon..Artikel berikut sangat menarik untuk mencari kaitannya...selamat membaca dan semoga bermanfaat!
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How "The NAFTA Flu" Exploded
Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu
By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
April 29, 2009
US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the "swine flu" outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in
Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit
the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:
Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches
business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air
contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory
infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to
Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.
http://www.narconews.com/images/smithfldlogo.gif
The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu
symptoms in March.
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La
Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified "swine flu" in
February as "patient zero," five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a
survivor of the disease.
By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime
of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local
daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches
was "the cause of the epidemic."
La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots
to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In
1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most
expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean
Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield,
Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company,
according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog
waste into the river.
It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a
polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at
that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But
"free trade" opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its
harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the
tougher US regulators.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on
January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the
"Carroll Ranches" in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new
subsidiary corporation, "Agroindustrias de México."
Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the
new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other
products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated
27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of
packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about
three percent of its total production.)
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield's
US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions
that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):
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.
Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to
unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests
to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the
environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in
clear and understandable human terms.
The so-called "swine flu" exploded because an environmental disaster
simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where
environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced
against powerful multinational corporations.
False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican
citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their
nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current
"swine flu" media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a
time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican
citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri
dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international
sale.
None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but,
rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal
conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La
Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international
pandemic.
Welcome to the aftermath of "free trade." Authorities now want you to
grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak
hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with
fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember
this: The real name of this infirmity is "The NAFTA Flu," the first of
what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as
the direct result of "free trade" agreements that allow companies like
Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.
Lea Ud. el Artículo en Español
Leia este artigo em português
http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html
-------------
Suspected epicentre of swine flu is CDM project
Published: 30 Apr 2009 14:28 CET Last updated: 30 Apr 2009 15:47 CET
A pig farm in Mexico claimed to be the source of swine flu is host to a
UN-registered CDM project.
The clean development mechanism (CDM) project, which has not gone into
operation, was to be developed by UK-listed Ecosecurities at a pig farm
near the town of La Perote in Veracruz state.
Media reports have cited the farm as a possible source of swine flu that
threatens to become a global pandemic.
However the plant's owners and the Mexican government said there is no
evidence for these claims, and the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) is carrying out an investigation at the site.
"Depending on the outcome of the investigation from the FAO, it is
feasible that, if it had been implemented, the project would have helped
by improving waste management on the site," said Belinda Kinkead, head
of implementation of Ecosecurities.
Little impact
Kinkead said swine flu was unlikely to have a major impact on supply of
credits - unless the Mexican government was to order a mass cull of pigs
in order to prevent the spread of disease.
But so far the government shows few signs of doing this until a firm
link is established between porcine and human influenza.
According to design documents, projects that capture animal waste in
Mexico could supply around 23 million carbon credits from the Kyoto
protocol's CDM between now and the end of 2012.
But the percentage of credits generated by the sector is typically only
a quarter of that promised.
Of the 89 projects in the sector registered by the UN, just 16 projects
have been issued with credits.
Ecosecurities has plans to develop 28 CDM projects in Mexico that cut
methane emissions from pig waste, but only 10 have gone into operation,
as the number of credits yielded by such projects is now so small as to
render many of them unfeasible, Kinkead said.
AWMS
Other investors in animal waste management systems (AWMS) include
Agcert, a company that was formerly listed on the London Stock
Exchange.
AES Agriverde, which now controls Agcert's methane capture projects,
said it couldn't comment on the impact of swine flu on its Mexican
operations because the company operates a media blackout in advance of
declaring quarterly earnings.
Besides trying to sell CDM credits from projects developed by Agcert,
the company aims to generate credits that could be sold in a future
federal trading scheme in the US.
Only last week, before news of swine flu broke, a US developer
Environmental Credit Corp said it would try and generate 200,000 CERs
from methane capture projects in Mexico.
Cargill, a large US commodities trader, is also involved in methane
capture CDM projects in Mexico, and is named as a participant in the La
Perote project now being investigated by the FAO.
However, no one from the company was available to comment at press
time.
Flies
Media outlets from across the world have reported claims by villagers
close to the La Perote pig farm that flies feeding on animal waste at
the facility had helped spread swine flu to the local human population.
The FAO has said so far there is no evidence that swine flu has spread
directly from pigs to humans in this way.
At pig farms, companies such as Ecosecurities use technology known as an
anaerobic digester to cover up lagoons of animal waste at pig farms and
then generate electricity from the captured methane.
By John McGarrity - jm@pointcarbon.com
--
Support Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth Limited - Company No 1012357
Friends of the Earth Trust - Company No 1533942
Registered Charity No 281681
Registered Office - 26 - 28 Underwood Street, London. N1 7JQ
_______________________________________________
cce-foei mailing list
cce-foei@lists.foei.org
https://lists.foei.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cce-foei
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Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu
By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
April 29, 2009
US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the "swine flu" outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in
Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit
the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:
Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches
business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air
contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory
infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to
Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.
http://www.narconews.com/images/smithfldlogo.gif
The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu
symptoms in March.
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La
Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified "swine flu" in
February as "patient zero," five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a
survivor of the disease.
By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime
of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local
daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches
was "the cause of the epidemic."
La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots
to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In
1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most
expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean
Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield,
Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company,
according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog
waste into the river.
It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a
polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at
that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But
"free trade" opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its
harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the
tougher US regulators.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on
January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the
"Carroll Ranches" in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new
subsidiary corporation, "Agroindustrias de México."
Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the
new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other
products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated
27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of
packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about
three percent of its total production.)
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield's
US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions
that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):
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.
Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to
unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests
to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the
environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in
clear and understandable human terms.
The so-called "swine flu" exploded because an environmental disaster
simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where
environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced
against powerful multinational corporations.
False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican
citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their
nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current
"swine flu" media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a
time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican
citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri
dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international
sale.
None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but,
rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal
conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La
Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international
pandemic.
Welcome to the aftermath of "free trade." Authorities now want you to
grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak
hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with
fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember
this: The real name of this infirmity is "The NAFTA Flu," the first of
what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as
the direct result of "free trade" agreements that allow companies like
Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.
Lea Ud. el Artículo en Español
Leia este artigo em português
http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html
-------------
Suspected epicentre of swine flu is CDM project
Published: 30 Apr 2009 14:28 CET Last updated: 30 Apr 2009 15:47 CET
A pig farm in Mexico claimed to be the source of swine flu is host to a
UN-registered CDM project.
The clean development mechanism (CDM) project, which has not gone into
operation, was to be developed by UK-listed Ecosecurities at a pig farm
near the town of La Perote in Veracruz state.
Media reports have cited the farm as a possible source of swine flu that
threatens to become a global pandemic.
However the plant's owners and the Mexican government said there is no
evidence for these claims, and the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) is carrying out an investigation at the site.
"Depending on the outcome of the investigation from the FAO, it is
feasible that, if it had been implemented, the project would have helped
by improving waste management on the site," said Belinda Kinkead, head
of implementation of Ecosecurities.
Little impact
Kinkead said swine flu was unlikely to have a major impact on supply of
credits - unless the Mexican government was to order a mass cull of pigs
in order to prevent the spread of disease.
But so far the government shows few signs of doing this until a firm
link is established between porcine and human influenza.
According to design documents, projects that capture animal waste in
Mexico could supply around 23 million carbon credits from the Kyoto
protocol's CDM between now and the end of 2012.
But the percentage of credits generated by the sector is typically only
a quarter of that promised.
Of the 89 projects in the sector registered by the UN, just 16 projects
have been issued with credits.
Ecosecurities has plans to develop 28 CDM projects in Mexico that cut
methane emissions from pig waste, but only 10 have gone into operation,
as the number of credits yielded by such projects is now so small as to
render many of them unfeasible, Kinkead said.
AWMS
Other investors in animal waste management systems (AWMS) include
Agcert, a company that was formerly listed on the London Stock
Exchange.
AES Agriverde, which now controls Agcert's methane capture projects,
said it couldn't comment on the impact of swine flu on its Mexican
operations because the company operates a media blackout in advance of
declaring quarterly earnings.
Besides trying to sell CDM credits from projects developed by Agcert,
the company aims to generate credits that could be sold in a future
federal trading scheme in the US.
Only last week, before news of swine flu broke, a US developer
Environmental Credit Corp said it would try and generate 200,000 CERs
from methane capture projects in Mexico.
Cargill, a large US commodities trader, is also involved in methane
capture CDM projects in Mexico, and is named as a participant in the La
Perote project now being investigated by the FAO.
However, no one from the company was available to comment at press
time.
Flies
Media outlets from across the world have reported claims by villagers
close to the La Perote pig farm that flies feeding on animal waste at
the facility had helped spread swine flu to the local human population.
The FAO has said so far there is no evidence that swine flu has spread
directly from pigs to humans in this way.
At pig farms, companies such as Ecosecurities use technology known as an
anaerobic digester to cover up lagoons of animal waste at pig farms and
then generate electricity from the captured methane.
By John McGarrity - jm@pointcarbon.com
--
Support Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth Limited - Company No 1012357
Friends of the Earth Trust - Company No 1533942
Registered Charity No 281681
Registered Office - 26 - 28 Underwood Street, London. N1 7JQ
_______________________________________________
cce-foei mailing list
cce-foei@lists.foei.org
https://lists.foei.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cce-foei
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "walhiclimate" group.
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For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/walhiclimate?hl=en
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