Blog Posts: Privatization

By Anna Ghosh

Warning: do not read this while eating a chicken sandwich. Discussing the privatization of poultry inspection is gross, but letting the USDA get away with it is even more disgusting, not to mention makes our food less safe and puts workers in danger. Tell Secretary Vilsack not to privatize poultry inspection!

According to the National Chicken Council, “Americans buy more chicken than any other food at the center of the plate.” It’s safe to assume that Americans would like that chicken to be healthy, wholesome and free of fecal matter, bile, scabs, bruises and other unappetizing contamination. But the USDA isn’t concerned about these things. They call them “quality defects” and would rather leave it up the company employees to deal with; compensating for less inspection with more anti-microbial chemicals. But as the Washington Post uncovered, this is a deadly solution.

Since 2011, Food & Water Watch and its allies have been fighting plans to privatize poultry inspection as a matter of consumer and worker safety. In March of 2012, Food & Water Watch analyzed the USDA’s HACCP-based Inspection Models Project (HIMP), the pilot that the current privatization scheme is based on, and found that large numbers of defects are routinely missed when company employees instead of USDA inspectors perform inspection tasks. In April of 2012, inspectors and more than 150,000 consumer spoke out about HIMP, prompting investigative stories from ABC News and the New York Times. We’ve also spent some time fact checking USDA officials, and former officials as Food & Water Watch Senior Lobbyist Tony Corbo did today in Food Safety News:

A year ago, Food & Water Watch was contacted by a consumer in Georgia who had bought a package of chicken that he intended to barbeque for his family on Mother’s Day.  When he opened up the package, he found that some of the chicken breasts had some hard yellow substances on them.  He sent us photos of the packaging and of the suspect chicken breasts.  It turned out that those yellow substances were of partially digested chicken feed or ingesta.  That product should never have been allowed into commerce.  The package wrapper had the USDA-Inspected legend on it with the establishment number P-177.  P-177 happens to be the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Gainesville, Georgia.  That plant also happens to be one of the 20 HIMP broiler plants that Dr. Raymond is so proud of where the privatized inspection model is being piloted by USDA.   You can take a look at the photo of the ingesta on that chicken on our website and an analysis of the inspection data from some of the HIMP plants we did that revealed that not only feathers were missed by the company employees, but a whole host of other “defects” such as visible fecal contamination.

I showed the photos that we had received from that consumer to Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia who at the time was the Chairman of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee and the main congressional advocate to privatize poultry inspection, and to the current USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen and FSIS Administrator Alfred Almanza.  I explained what the photos represented and I told all of them that when I go to KFC to order fried chicken, the cashier always asks:  “Do you want original recipe or crispy?”  Not “Do you want original recipe or CRUNCHY?”  Yes, Dr. Raymond, I want my taxpayer dollars to go to government inspectors to keep the food I feed my family safe and wholesome.

As Mother Jones Food Blogger Tom Philpott points out, while the Obama administration boasts about the minor government savings and major savings for big poultry companies, the USDA’s claims of food safety are shaky and concern for worker safety nonexistent. No matter how many chemical dunks are used, privatized poultry inspection will lead to unsafe food and unsafe working conditions. Period. Let Secretary Vilsack know how you feel about foul privatized foul here: http://fwwat.ch/ickychix

By Tim Schwab

Journalism and agriculture students at public universities, watch out.

Your administrators are laying out the red carpet for corporate junkets at a campus near you. With names like HungerU and Biotech University, these “educational” opportunities amount to little more than a slick propaganda campaign from biotech corporations.

DuPont Crop Protection (translation: herbicides and pesticides) is visiting universities in California and Arizona this week, wooing students with $2,500 grants and embarking on a mission to “educate college students about the significance of modern agriculture.” It’s called HungerU.

That’s a catchy name, but does a profit-driven chemical producer whose goal is to expand herbicide and pesticide sales really have much to offer students on the issue of food security? Something tells me its answer to hunger is more chemicals.

Meanwhile, Biotech U goes beyond the ag school to influence an entirely different set of future professionals: journalism students. Each year, the industry-friendly United Soybean Board partners with our nation’s journalism schools in an effort to “educate” future reporters about the role of biotechnology. The program includes all-expense paid gigs on agricultural reporting in exotic places like Turkey and China. This year, the winner goes to Italy. Who wouldn’t want a trip to Italy?

Noting that these future journalists will be “shaping the public’s perception of biotechnology in the coming decades,” Biotech U is part of a long-term strategic plan by the biotech industry to foster public acceptance of genetically engineered crops. The program also intends to “enlist future biotech advocates identified within university journalism programs to develop a draft program at other journalism schools.”

These insidious efforts by the biotech industry are a very small part of the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into academia from corporations, distorting the science and perverting the mission of higher education. Our public universities increasingly function like corporate laboratories—taking corporate research money to conduct experiments in corporate-sponsored laboratories, then publishing pro-industry findings in corporate-sponsored “scientific” journals.

Food & Water Watch detailed the ways in which industry is buying influence at our public universities in our report Public Research, Private Gain.

This new era of corporate influence is undermining intellectual freedom and academic independence. Professors that might otherwise pursue research that might challenge the bottom lines of biotech companies—for example, studying the negative health, environmental or economic effects of pesticides and biotech crops—simply choose not to for fear of losing future industry research funding or upsetting tenure-granting administrators. That means federal agencies writing the rules and regulations that govern biotech corporations often base their decisions on a body of science that only says industrial agriculture is safe, good and necessary.

Meanwhile, farmers that might want to want to pursue an alternative production model to agrochemicals, monocultures and factory farms have little research or academic support.

And students—our next generation of journalists, farmers and policy makers—graduate from schools that increasingly offer only the virtues of big business instead of teaching students to think critically about the dominant model of industrial agriculture or consider alternative solutions.

Don’t biotech and pesticide companies already have too much influence over our public universities? If you attend one of these schools, call your university administrators and tell them enough is enough.

By Marcela Olivera

This blog was originally posted at Thebrokeronline.eu.

In the Americas, we have been fighting water privatization since the early 1990s: from Detroit in the United States to Buenos Aires in Argentina. After the infamous 2000 water war in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that led to the expulsion of a multinational corporation, social movements throughout the Americas have organized themselves to protect water from greed.

In August 2003, in El Salvador, several organizations from the Americas assembled and decided to create the Red VIDA (Network for Inter-American Vigilance in Defense of and for the Right to Water).  Through this network, we would launch a coordinated hemispheric campaign to defend water as a common good. 

Since its beginning in 2003, we have worked very hard resisting water privatization and expelling corporations that were profiting from our water sources and water utilities. We have also insured that constitutional amendments were passed that prevent the commodification of water. In Uruguay, for example, the Red VIDA was active in the campaign that led to a constitutional amendment declaring access to water as a human right. 

Read the full article…

Last week, a condensed version of Andy Bellatti’s interview with Wenonah Hauter on her new book Foodopoly ran on Grist: Aisle be damned: How Big Food dominates your supermarket choices. We thought our blog readers would appreciate seeing the entire interview, which goes into the specifics on how fractured our food system really is,  how it got that way and what we can do about it.

1. In Foodopoly, you make a very convincing argument that, unlike what many in the “good food” movement think, crop subsidies are not the problem to solve, but rather the symptom of a much larger problem. Can you expand on that concept? Read the full article…

By Tony Corbo 

The White House turkey pardoning ceremony, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

As the White House pardons two lucky turkeys today—Gobbler and Cobbler—I’m reminded of the fact that some months ago, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the Virginia Cargill plant that the birds likely would have been processed (if not for the pardon). The results are in, and they aren’t pretty. The Cargill plant in Rockingham County, Virginia (where Cobbler and Gobbler are from) was cited for fecal contamination multiple times (see pages 1-4 of this PDF). 

It’s no wonder. The plant is part of a pilot project for HIMP, the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project. It’s a USDA pilot project that allows workers in poultry plants to self-inspect, essentially privatizing food safety inspections. Line speeds in HIMP turkey slaughter plants are 72% faster than in plants that receive normal USDA inspection. USDA has proposed to expand the HIMP inspection model to all poultry plants.

As you sit down for Thanksgiving tomorrow, you might give thanks for the fact that there are two less turkeys from HIMP project plants on America’s tables.

Take action today—tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to reject privatized meat inspections.

By Mitch Jones

There’s been an increase of chatter lately about the prospects of global water markets. CUNY journalism professor Frederick Kaufman published an essay in Nature that raises concerns about the prospects for a future financialized global water market. His concerns aren’t too different than what we have been saying. But his essay has provoked a response from The Nature Conservancy. 

Under the title “Water Privatization: Let’s Cut the Hysteria,” Brian Richter dismisses concerns about the financialization of nature and the privatization of our common resources. In particular he responds to Professor Kaufman’s concerns about a global water market, claiming it is not going to happen (or not the way Professor Kaufman thinks it will) and it’s “highly unlikely” it would be traded globally, and if it were, it’s price wouldn’t be volatile.

No one claims that there is currently a global bulk water market. There isn’t. There is a global bottled water market, and that market is the thin end of the wedge for getting people used to the idea of water as a commodity. This is important, because in order to create a global water market, water has to be turned into a commodity. Water also has to be privatized for water markets to exist, and that is taking place globally as well. Once water is privatized and commoditized, marketizing it easily follows. Privatized, commoditized, and marketized water can be financialized – with derivatives markets built up to allow financial actors to speculate on the price of water. This speculation in itself could drive price volatility, as evidence shows speculators are increasingly driving the traditional commodity markets.

A global water market is still a threat, even though the economists who dream of it say it is 25 to 30 years away. The chief economist at Citigroup has a vision of globally integrated physical water markets, single hulled water tankers sailing the oceans and a water derivatives market. Already, Valérie Issumo, a Switzerland-based economist, has developed what she terms an “Ethical Water Exchange” designed for the commoditization of treated water on which futures could be traded or serve as the conditions for credit lines. Economist Henning Bjornlund claims a derivatives market for water could provide efficiencies for the distribution of water that would be bigger than the water market itself. What that means is that a water derivatives market would make it even more likely that those who can afford to pay the most for water will be the ones to get water.

This isn’t hysteria. It’s the vision of determined economists – some at powerful banks – who believe the financialized free-market paradigm that brought us the global economic crisis is the right model for determining who gets water where, and for what purpose.

But it isn’t surprising that the folks at The Nature Conservancy are asking us to look the other way—they are deeply invested in the financialization of nature. Their Natural Capital Project seeks to expand the market paradigm over all of nature. They work to develop a global carbon market that would seek to offset pollution by allowing companies to buy offsets in other countries, even going so far as to call for a carbon free-trading zone of the Americas. 

As George Monbiot has pointed out nature has become natural capital, and natural processes have become ecosystems services. The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Capital Project is part of this process seeking to find a quantifiable economic value for the natural world. It accepts the canard that what can’t be priced can’t be valued.

We believe that our common resources can’t be reduced to an entry in an accounts book. Their value is too great to be priced. Instead of gambling with financial actors and markets in nature-based assets, we should rely on the regulation of activities that harm the environment and contribute to climate change. Instead of pushing the expansion, integration and financialization of water markets, we should implement and enforce regulations that preserve our essential resources and promote policies that acknowledge water as a human right.

By Marcela Olivera and Susan Spronk

Click here to learn more about water privatization in Latin America.

We are sitting in a large Catholic hall nestled in the heart of Mexico City, the type of space where many Latin American social movements have historically sought refuge from dictatorships. Today, we are not fending off the military but big multinationals and our governments who want to sell our water, use it to grow soy or poison it with their mines. 

We have gathered for the general assembly of Red Vida, an inter-American network of social movements working in defense of water from Canada to Argentina. Forty of us are debating political strategy to build on our successes in reversing the tide of privatization of the 1990s (see Struggles for Water Justice in Latin America).

Mexico in hot water

We can’t rest on our laurels. Mexico is just one ‘hot spot’ where our brothers and sisters are fighting private water companies and governments that support them. They have seen how private providers in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina have failed to deliver on their promises for cheaper and higher quality water services, and they can’t let their country make the same mistakes.

In Mexico, a national coalition of environmentalist organizations, COMDA, is currently embroiled in a campaign to reform the water law. COMDA wants the law to respect the right of communities to manage their own water resources and to defend the commons against ‘enclosure’, particularly from contamination by big mining companies.

Debating strategies

One of the productive tensions that has emerged in this meeting is whether we should be pushing our governments to include the ‘right to water’ in legislation or whether we should be focusing our energies on struggles to defend ‘the commons’.

Oscar Olivera from Fundación Abril (Bolivia) spoke eloquently about the need to defend spaces of self-government such as community-run water systems in the peri-urban areas of the Andes. If people have constructed their own water systems with sweat and blood, do we really ‘need’ the state to provide these services? Many members of such autonomous communities, most self-identifying as indigenous, see the state as an alien institution imposed by colonial rule.

By contrast, Adriana Marquisio from Uruguay’s publicly owned and operated water utility OSEhighlighted that state provision in her country has allowed to achieve near universal coverage, and much higher quality services than many of the small community systems could ever provide.

From our conversations it is clear that it is not enough to frame our campaigns around the right to water and we must document concrete alternatives to privatization. Red Vida is better able to do that thanks to collaboration with researchers from the Municipal Services Project, who attended our assemblies as invited observers in Buga, Colombia in May 2009 and are here with us again in Mexico. 

If we can articulate what the alternatives are perhaps we can convince others that privatization is not the solution. We can also demonstrate the negative impact of the more insidious practices of sub-contracting and corporatization, which threaten the ‘public’ nature of our utilities. These trends are affecting every one of us, whether our governments claim to be left-of-center or not.

As our Declaration signed in Mexico by all member organizations of the Red Vida states, in the face of all these struggles, we will continue to fight “like water, in a manner that is transparent, joyful and always in motion…until the final victory.” 

Marcela Olivera is the Latin American coordinator for the Water for All Campaign of Food and Water Watch, and coordinates the Red Vida.

Susan Spronk teaches international development at the University of Ottawa. She is an active participant in several projects of the Red Vida and a research associate with the Municipal Services Project. 

This was originally posted on the blog of the Municipal Services Project.

By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Sometimes the forces working to commoditize our vital natural resources exist in plain sight, flaunting their selfish motives. Other times, they hide behind euphemistic smokescreens, which is far and away more menacing.  Regardless of where you may find them, their actions share a common consequence—undermining our collective right to access safe, clean, affordable water.

Last May, I traveled to Dubai for the Global Water: Oil & Gas Summit where I was surrounded by corporate executives discussing their “drill baby drill” philosophy with abandon and no mention of the environmental or societal costs. Then in August, I traveled to Los Angeles to speak at the premiere of a film about powerful corporate interests who conceal their intentions to privatize California’s water supply behind the guise of conservation and disaster preparedness. 

While half a world apart, these scenarios both represent the global force determined to privatize and commodify water for the sheer benefit of corporate profits. My colleague Scott Edwards says it best: “Water-related death, drought and degradation aren’t calamities; they’re profit opportunities.” This couldn’t be truer for California where political wars have been waged over water since the Gold Rush. Read the full article…

Mitch Jones, Common Resources Program Director

By Mitch Jones 

Although no one in the media seems to be talking about it, a meeting is taking place in Virginia that could cement the same economic interests that lead us to the 2007 crisis. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being negotiated by 13 countries would lead to increased gas exports and increased imported foods, while undermining our domestic laws and increasing the financialization of nature.

The secretive talks are in their 14^th round, having begun under George W. Bush in 2008, and have so far managed to avoid real scrutiny. Little of the document being negotiated has been made publicly available, but what we do know is frightening. The TPP would go well beyond NAFTA tearing down protections in the areas of financial services, telecommunications and intellectual property. It would create free trade for dairy, sugar and textiles. American manufacturers and farmers would suffer, while Wall Street banks reap huge profits and move more operations offshore.

The TPP is being sold as just another “free trade” agreement. But don’t be fooled, it’s so much more. Only two of the twenty-six chapters of the agreement are directly trade related. 

Read the full article…

By Mitch Jones

Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it is awarding over $7 million in grants to organizations and state agencies across the country to develop water quality trading, or cap-and-trade for nitrogen and phosphorous pollution. Under the guise of controlling pollution, the government is actually trying to give people the option of buying and selling the “right” to pollute.

This is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.

Water quality trading is nothing new, although the government is pushing to make it the dominant way that we try to control pollution in our waterways. In fact, over the past 20 years, few if any trading schemes have delivered positive results. Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc., the trade industry for the poultry industry in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, knows the real effect of water quality trading. In their June 2010 newsletter, they described the idea as “a program … to help farmers earn money while providing polluters with the opportunity to increase their pollution to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.” And taxpayers subsidize it all. 

Water quality trading is really just a way for the government to avoid regulating pollution in our waterways while turning over its responsibilities to financial interests. Wall Street bankers are looking for new opportunities to create big bonuses for themselves, and they are turning their sights to our common resources. In awarding $7 million to help make this possible, the USDA is selling out our resources to the Wall Street casino. If you like what they did with the housing market, just wait ‘til you see what they do with our water.