Know your Enemy

Cargill - 'The Worst Company in the World'

We are all sitting crammed in a semi-circle round the log fire as the draught roars up the chimney and the cold air at our backs replaces it. That’s how it was in 1968. My elder brother was back from university, ostentatiously wearing his college scarf to keep him warm, reading the Christmas Eve edition of the Guardian- the one with the puzzles and stories to keep you entertained over the break. Ha, ha, ha, he said, or maybe ho, ho, ho, there a piece in here by you Richard!

I grabbed it from him, and started to read the article.

“The boys hung the turkeys on the line, where they flapped their wings listlessly, and then stopped, looking around them with large soft blinking eyes, calling sometimes to each other or to the other turkeys waiting in the lorries. Coaches creaked and bounced over the muddy yard, bringing the workers from towns and villages. They ran to put on their overalls, caps, gloves, and rubber boots, and stood around the cold dark yard waiting for the line to start.

They stand around in the same way every morning, finishing a cigarette, reading the paper, until the line begins to move and the chargehands run up and down. Every morning. The birds hanging on the line move off slowly, evenly, round a sharp bend, down a slope, and over the electric stunner, beating their wings in a brief frenzy, and only calming down as they pass a young boy whose face is set with concentration as his sharp knife passes cleanly across the neck of turkey after turkey. They lift their heads a little, and look around, still blinking, as their blood drips from them, and they disappear into the machinery.

When they reappear on my part of the production line, they are still soft and warm. I can still smell the life in them, and feel the tissues sliding gently and perfectly upon each other. After only a few hours I know turkeys’ bodies better than my own. They are fascinating, compelling, neither beautiful nor ugly, and 2000 of them pass before me every hour. Necks, heads, and mother of pearl intestines float slowly down a metal channel, and liver and gizzards down a tributary stream. Everywhere there is running water, casting up shoals and sandbanks of gizzards and heads, deltas of offal. In a corner a blind head lies unnoticed, trodden on.

Each time I reach out to grab a neck, I recoil slightly. The women help me, showing me the quickest way. They are very kind, not at all impatient, so long as I pretend to be keen on my work, and keen on earning the productivity bonus. They help me if my hands are blistered, and do their own work and shout their conversations as they do so. The birds swing gently past, and music crashes out from the very-loud-speakers in the roof.

At eleven o’clock there is a tea break, and later an hour for lunch. The girls sit in their bloodstained overalls, drinking tea, talking about a dance, a boyfriend, a television play. An ugly bent old man walks up and down, sweeping up paper and cigarette ends, and the bell rings for work to start again. We run down the stairs, back to the line, which is already moving. Foremen cry out their slogans – See to your giblets there! See to your giblets!

Opposite me today is a rather pretty blonde girl, bloodstained like the rest, with a calm and pleasant face. She chews gum, and whenever the line slows down, whenever her hands are free, she slips a hand inside her overall and holds one of her breasts. At first this disturbed me, but if she noticed she did not seem to care. The mechanics and knife-grinders always stop and talk to her, but she doesn’t say much to them; she smiles a little and keeps her hand inside her overall.

This habit does not seem to worry anyone but me. Perhaps she feels the need to feel live flesh, but I don’t like to think of it. My dreams are now not of incidents or conversations. I wake in the morning sickened by dreams of textures and colours, soft and tepid, damp, green and red and yellow. Flesh is something that I tear and cut, something that floats in aluminium troughs.

In this roar of water and steam, electric motors and pop records, my thoughts are slow and confused. In the afternoon I can sometimes make the singers sing the verses that I want next and not the verses they want, but they still make little sense. When night comes I climb into the cold coach and sit there dumb and frozen, listening to the girls talking. The driver says: “Why do you do a job like this?” and one of them replies,”Oh, it’s not bad, and the money’s good if you work fast enough; you get used to it.”  You just chew your gum and stand there waiting for another day to pass. Waiting, like the turkeys hanging on the line.”     

When I wrote that piece so long ago I was concerned about the plight of people with little option other than to do de-humanising work, and the plight of sentient beings like chickens and turkeys being exploited for cheap food. I was also becoming an environmentalist, a fairly rare species in those days. Although industrialised agriculture had been enriching large corporations in America for some time, in this country the devastating effects of industrialised farming had only been felt by species more sensitive than humans and more directly in the firing line of agricultural weaponry. Rachel Carson’s recent book ‘Silent Spring’ had met fierce criticism and counter-attacks from the American chemical companies, although it was actually quite moderate in its approach to pesticide use.  Its publication marked a stage in the interminably slow growth of public awareness of our destruction of the biosphere.

The local chicken factory – we all called it the Chicko – was owned at that time by a man who lived locally, a man about whom all sorts of racy tales were told. These kinds of legends often form around buccaneering capitalist entrepreneurs who seem to operate somewhat outside the normal rules that constrain the rest of us. He had started raising chickens in some disused military barracks just after the war, and happened to be in what must have seemed to him to be the right place at the right time.

 In America the giant agricultural corporations were busy developing a broiler chicken that could reach a slaughter weight of 2kg after five weeks or so. This was designed to be put through an industrialised chicken production system, a system as mechanised as dealing with living creatures would allow, and designed to eliminate the need for skill in the chicken farmer. The young chicks were supplied by the company, and the feed was often also supplied by the company, and when the chickens were slaughtered the cost of the feed was deducted from the cheque.

The owner of the Chicko became involved in broiler chickens produced on the American model, and the factory expanded. As the Chicko grew and farmers in Herefordshire and the hills of Powys spotted a new income source, banks and planning committees looked benevolently on applications for new chicken units, and little thought was given to the environmental consequences. In those relatively innocent-seeming days when I worked at the Chicko it could be viewed as part of a rural economy where farm products such as apples and chickens came in to the Chicko and to the cider factory, providing food, drink and employment. And like many parts of the rural economy, where everyone knew each other, getting planning permission and finance for chicken sheds was made as easy as possible. Although farming probably took up more government and European energy and cash than any other industry, and used the precious environment as its raw material more blatantly than any other industry on earth, efforts to regulate the impact of agriculture were feeble, and perhaps nowhere more feeble than in the Welsh Borders, where planning applications for chicken sheds were rarely challenged. Evans the Council and Dai Planning knew Roberts the Chickens and Price the Poultry and if Smith and Jones didn’t want a shed next door with 96,000 chickens and the associated smell and flies, they kept quiet because they had to live in the same village and it wasn’t worth sticking their necks out. As a result chickens became a hugely profitable part of farming, especially in parts of Wales where farming is otherwise only possible because of perverse subsidies. The Welsh government appears to believe that farming is at the centre of Welsh identity, language and culture, and has little appetite for challenging the chicken shed economy and no cogent plans to do so. The UK government seems to have no plans at all…

It is regrettable that we did not challenge these developments earlier, when we might have had more chance of being heard. Much of the Chicko’s products went to UK companies like Marks and Spencer, and the owner o the factory lived locally.  Our protests might not have been so different from those now held bravely by local groups, who muster small knots of people to picket the factory or a local branch of Tesco, but they might have had some chance of being heard and influencing policy before it was too late.

 Now the enemy has changed, and it is not going to listen to a few citizen scientists telling the Environment Agency and anyone else who will listen about the death of the River Wye. Destroying the Wye is a very small part of the environmental destruction caused by Cargill, who took over the Chicko in 1980. Cargill, one of the giant corporations driving world-wide industrial farming, has been called the worst company in the world, a company with an appalling record of damage and destruction of the environment unrivalled by any other. Cargill is the biggest of the four corporations that control 90% of world grain trade, with an annual revenue  reported this year (1922) of $165 billion. (Being privately owned it is less accountable than other American companies.) There are also, as it happens, 4 huge companies that control 66% of the farm chemicals trade worldwide, and another 4 that control 99% of the world chicken breeding market. There is nothing rustic or bucolic about Cargill, a company deeply involved worldwide in many of the worst ramifications of industrial farming, and fingers in more pies than you can shake a stick at. If you look them up on Wikipedia – a very unedifying read - you will find their operations discussed under headings that include Child Trafficking, Child Labour, Union Busting, Land Grabbing, Food Contamination, Deforestation, Soya, Palm Oil and Tax Evasion. Recently the US conservation organisation Mighty Earth issued a report labelling Cargill as The Worst Company in the World, saying ‘Cargill is the corporate behemoth at the nexus of the global industrial agriculture system, a system that it has designed to convert large swaths of the planet into chemically dependent industrial scale monocultures’. It has ‘more power to single-handedly destroy or protect the world’s climate, water, food security, public health, and human rights than any single company in history.’ In the introduction to the report Henry Waxman, a US Senator for 40 years, says ‘The people who have been sickened or died from eating contaminated Cargill meat, the child laborers who grow the cocoa Cargill sells for the world’s chocolate, the Midwesterners who drink water polluted by Cargill, the Indigenous People displaced by vast deforestation to make way for Cargill’s animal feed, and the ordinary consumers who’ve paid more to put food on the dinner table because of Cargill’s financial malfeasance — all have felt the impact of this agribusiness giant. Their lives are worse for having come into contact with Cargill’ … and that of course includes us in the Wye Valley.

This company continues to resist the efforts of environmentalists and governments to persuade it to change its business model, and many other companies find it difficult to make environmental improvements because they are in competition with this monster company. Having allowed it to dominate and destroy the ecology of the Wye Valley, we have put ourselves in a position of having no chance of persuading it to cooperate to make our farming less destructive. If it won’t see reason about its destruction in the Amazon region, it ain’t going to listen to us. As long as Cargill conducts its business in this area the River Wye is doomed. I am sad to conclude that a few people outside the Avara chicken plant, (the result of a joint venture in which Cargill seems to have a 50% stake), are not going to change the minds of a few insanely rich moguls in Minnesota, for whom the relentless acquisition of more wealth and power is more important than the very survival of the planet. These people are not to be reasoned with.

Writing and researching about the environment is painful and difficult and often discouraging, and aiming to get those who run companies like Cargill to change seems futile. They are products of a system and an ideology that is designed to enrich and empower a few individuals without concern about damage to the planet. Wherever you start on your journey of understanding what we are doing to the planet, it is eventually hard to avoid the conclusion that the capitalist way of doing business is not sustainable, because those who run it answer to the shareholders and not to the rest of us who want a habitable planet. A system which in practice does not acknowledge that those who own and run it need a habitable planet just as much as the rest of us is not, to put it mildly, a sensible system. A system where Cargill, still in effect a family business, can ruin the Wye Valley, devastate the Amazon region and in so many other ways lead the destruction of environments and cultures is not a sensible system.  With Cargill leading this stampede of the Gadarene swine no good future is possible.

I still feel reticent about publicly questioning capitalism, because in the past those who did so were often demonised. In the past we usually thought about capitalism in purely human terms. Some believed that capitalism exploited the workers; others that the rich were rewarded for running a system that at the very least gave the working classes fridges and washing machines. Your attitudes to it depended on who you thought you were, how you thought you might benefit from such a system, or on your inability to envisage any change. People on either side of this debate have been hostile to each other even to the point of violent revolution. But this oppositional way of thinking developed when politics and economics generally did not concern itself with the health of the planet on which we all depend. David Cameron spoke dismissively of that ‘green crap’ as he axed environmental measures that might have made our present fuel crisis much less severe. To see the way we finance businesses, or how we might hold them responsible for caring for the planet, in terms of this left/right polarisation is, or should be (aware as we are of looming environmental catastrophe) as obsolete as discussing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin or arguing which tune to play on our fiddles as we watch Rome burning.

There are, of course, many possible ways of organising human activity so that we produce what we need as economically as possible, lead more fulfilling lives than many of us do at present, and enjoy love and family and friends and nature and music and whatever else turns us on without wrecking this gorgeous little planet. But make no mistake, there isn’t room for that and for Cargill, and you need to know your enemy.

If you shrink from my belief that if we are to save the planet we need to move to something better than capitalism, please open this link: https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the-world/ 

You will find that my portrayal of Cargill is fairly restrained.