Fighting to take back control of your dinner table
By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
China controls more of your food than you realize.
Eckrich Sausage, which started in Fort Wayne, Ind., is owned by Smithfield Foods. Armour hotdogs, founded in Chicago, Ill., is owned by Smithfield Foods.
Smithfield Foods is a subsidiary of WH Group. WH Group, formerly known as Shuanghui Group, is a publicly traded Chinese multinational meat and food processing company headquartered in Hong Kong.
Marty Irby, who serves as the president of Competitive Markets Action (CMA) and as board director for The Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM), spoke to The Reporter recently about the work his organizations do in advocating for smaller American farms and fighting the growing Chinese control of our food supply.
Irby
“We work with all small family farmers to mid-size family farmers,” Irby said. “I’m the board secretary at the Organization for Competitive Markets that was started in the 1990s for that very purpose.”
Irby works with farms that are not Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). A CAFO is a large-scale industrial farm operation that is widely considered to be both inhumane in its treatment of livestock and also responsible for a great deal of environmental damage.
“Those are large-scale farms that are typically owned or have been vertically integrated into the system with the four big packers like Smithfield, JBS, Cargill, and Tyson,” Irby said. “We work with the producers that are basically your organic farmers, farms to table, and farmers markets.”
Producers OCM works with tend to have less than 1,000 cattle or hogs.
“Most of them are, for beef, grass fed-type producers,” Irby said. “We work very closely with the American Grass Fed Association. And then we have a ton of pork producers that are supplying a lot of the retailers like Whole Foods and the folks who really are more concerned about factory farming and more humane and sustainable agriculture.”
Irby started working on Capitol Hill 10 years ago with former Kentucky Congressman Ed Whitfield. Seven years ago, he began working with farmers directly as their voice in Washington, D.C.
“For the most part, they’ve never had anybody representing them and have just been edged out by the big producers and members of Congress who think that when they’re talking to the federal Farm Bureau that they’re actually speaking for the farmer. Most people don’t realize that Farm Bureau is more of an insurance company than it is an actual advocacy arm for farmers,” Irby said. “That’s what most of their members are: people who actually buy insurance from them. So we appreciate the members of Congress who work with us like Victoria Spartz, Thomas Massie, and others who understand that. There are surprisingly a very low number of farmers who understand what those voices actually represent and who they actually are working for.”
Legislation in Indiana this session addressed concerns over foreign-owned companies buying Hoosier farmland near military bases, but foreign control of farmland is a national issue with implications at almost every American dinner table.
“That’s a huge issue that we are fighting against, specifically Smithfield, which is wholly owned by China,” Irby said. “The purchase of that company in 2013 was financed by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s buying up land all across America and what they ultimately want to do is bring in – I call them hog hotels, that may not be the common term – but there are these like 20-story buildings full of factory farm hogs.”
Irby said these hog hotels are, for all the obvious reasons, massive producers of pollution for the land around them. They also keep their livestock in very poor living conditions.
“It’s more of a factory than it is a farm in a building and that has put so many farmers out of business because of the consolidation,” Irby said. “There’s a tremendous amount of waste because of that confinement and consolidation.”
One of his concerns is allowing China to buy more farmland gives them even greater control over our American food supply.
“They already control most of our food supply,” Irby said. “It’s not even half – it’s more than half, but they’re eventually going to control our entire food supply if we continue to allow them to do that. I’ve seen states like Arkansas ban those types of practices. I think there’s something going on in Oklahoma like that now, so it’s a huge fight and I think there are far more people that are unaware of what’s going on but are becoming more and more aware.”
Irby told The Reporter a great deal of awareness of these issues grew out of the supply chain problems during the pandemic.
“People began to understand actually where our food comes from,” Irby said. “For the longest time people were just asleep at the wheel and members of Congress were asleep at the wheel, and one day you wake up and China controls your food supply.”
Irby gave special thanks to Representatives Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.-05) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.-04) for not only raising awareness of this and other concerns over foreign control of American food, but for their work trying to slow and stop the growth of that foreign influence.
Irby said he does not see a good way to roll back the level of China’s control over the American food supply without help from the Department of Justice.
“I think the only way that you could do that is to break up the four big packers’ monopoly,” Irby said. “That would be something that the Department of Justice would have to do. We’ve been encouraging that for years. Department of Justice has been very unengaged in the past on these issues. I think they’re becoming more engaged and realizing what’s going on.”
In the fight for more American control of American food, Irby said he needs allies in Washington, D.C. who understand the issues and are willing to take risks to create change. He told The Reporter most members of Congress simply don’t know enough about farming and farm issues.
“I’m so thankful for Victoria Spartz,” Irby said. “Between her and Thomas Massie, there’s no one in the House, no one in the Senate on either side of the aisle that directly understands these issues like the two of them do. And I hope the people there send her back to Congress.”