
Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US - shalmanese
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-is-china-treating-north-carolina-like-the-developing-world-w517973
======
eddieplan9
> This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it's
> also because of loose business and environmental regulations, especially in
> red states, which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for
> foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.

Come on. Chinese government does not give a shit about "offshore costly and
harmful business practices". The price of pork in China is 3 times of that in
the US not because the Chinese government has some stringent environmental
protection scheme regarding hog farms. It's because corn is _extremely_ cheap
in the US. And yes, China is now also importing cheap corn to raise hogs
domestically: [https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/china-buys-
up-t...](https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/china-buys-up-
to-700000-t-of-corn-for-import-as-domestic-prices-rally)

And if you read Chinese:
[http://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/cyxw/2016-04-07/doc-
ifxr...](http://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/cyxw/2016-04-07/doc-
ifxrcizs6967689.shtml)

~~~
padseeker
Isn't it surreal that the people who yell and scream about the government
regulation and interference are the same ones with their hands out looking for
government money to subsidize the animal feed they use? Is it cognitive
dissonance? Or are they that delusional they cannot see the connection? These
people will occasionally feign righteousness over government regulation and
spending unless its spending in their district for their stuff.

~~~
sangnoir
> Isn't it surreal that the people who yell and scream about the government
> regulation and interference are the same ones with their hands out looking
> for government money to subsidize the animal feed they use?

It probably is a facet of, or closely related to the Fundamental Attribution
Error: If I'm benefitting, it's because I deserve it to balance-out unfairness
out there, when some other moocher out there gets a hand, it is a waste of
money and a symptom of the bureaucratic nanny-state.

Exhibit 1: "I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No."[1]

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U)

------
sageabilly
One of the things this article doesn't touch on is the very deep roots of hog
farming in rural NC and the general prevailing attitude of "This is how we've
always done it and I don't want no gubment telling me what I can and can't do
with my land!" There is a sense of pride in being a hog farmer like your daddy
and your granpappy and your uncle and you hope to pass down those roots to
your sons some day. As to why there's a blind eye to the literal rivers of hog
shit flowing into the creeks/rivers every time it floods, that I have no idea-
I don't understand why people who live in that part of the state will cut
their nose off to spite their face by accepting huge hog waste lagoons as a
fact of life with hog farming. Being from NC I absolutely see Southern
Stubbornness at work here.

Driving down the interstates in the eastern part of NC you see multiple
billboards both pro- and anti-hog farming, with arguments ranging from "Hog
farming keeps my children fed!" to "Hog farming is destroying our
environment!" It reminds me of the pro- and anti-coal arguments currently
underway in West Virginia.

~~~
lsaferite
I'll not argue the point you are making as I don't disagree.

I would just like to say I find it highly annoying when people denigrate
people from the south by using 'words' like 'gubment' and 'granpappy' as some
sort of assumed indicator of intelligence level of the subject being
discussed. You being from NC and using this same backhanded insult troubles me
even more TBH. Do people from the south use those words, or ones that sound
like that, in conversation? Sure, sometimes. But your usage of them isn't in
an effort to be accurate but more to signal some perceived superiority of
intellect. You allow a difference in speech to sway opinion on your subjects
possibility of knowing what they talking about.

I was born in the south, raised in the south, and currently live in the south.
Whilst I find the southern twang of the people around me amusing (I don't have
much of the southern speech patterns for some reason), I would never let their
words and pronunciations cloud the fact that there are super smart people
amongst the crowd, just like any other part of the country.

And just in case I wasn't clear, using words like 'gubment' and 'granpappy'
naturally in your own writing isn't my issue, it's using them as a signal
about your subject that bothers me greatly.

~~~
wallawe
100% agree. It's become so commonplace to stereotype southerners in a
particular way in the media and by Hollywood. I live in NYC now and have to
deal with constant judgement whenever I mention I'm from Alabama. The most
ironic thing is that it's typically from the "tolerant" left.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
When I lived in Vicksburg Mississippi, I got a lot of flack for my weird
yankee (actually neutral midwestern) accent as well as typical northern
stereotypes (and I’m a westerner, not even a real yankee). I guess you could
say that should be expected from the less tolerant right, but it definitely
goes both ways.

~~~
wallawe
I went to school at All-Saints there in Vicksburg, small world! Yes, there is
definitely a stereotype in the south towards yankees (which is pretty much
anyone not from the south as you alluded). I just expected more from highly
educated folks with a wider world view in NYC.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I had friends that went there, but I was in public school (WCHS).

I think you’ll find people are insular everywhere. The only thing that might
be different in NYC is that more people didn’t grow up there and are
transplants.

------
moate
This has always been what sticks in my mind when people talk about "job
creation" to help rural Americans. We go to these old timey industries
(farming/mining), update the technologies involved in them to better help the
businesses, and then exploit the living hell out of some human labor to keep
profits very high and the cost of the product super low.

Regulations aren't there to "kill business", they're there to keep us from
backsliding into serfdom and child labor. A byproduct is hindering business,
but useful regulation should weigh the societal costs and determine that the
businesses need to be slowed/hindered for the greater good.

------
klunger
"More than just America's environment and human health is at stake. "Low-
paying jobs, like hog slaughtering and breeding, will remain in places like
Duplin County, but the higher-paid executive and marketing jobs will be lost,"
says Usha Haley, a professor at West Virginia University who has studied the
Chinese takeover of American agricultural assets for a decade. "

So... exactly like how many products are designed and managed in the US, but
manufactured in Chinese factories? Globalization goes both ways, especially
since we seem to be competing in a race to the bottom, with looser and looser
environmental and labor laws.

------
brockers
Laugh all you want, but I just got done talking to one of these NC pig farmers
yesterday and he is in the process of converting the sewage into methane gas
for electrical production. Local, community electricity, with a lower CO2
footprint than Methane!!?!

~~~
padobson
This is what I was hoping to see when I clicked on the comments thread. If you
can find a valuable use for the waste, then you can make it profitable (or at
least less expensive) for the farmers to keep the sewage out of the water
table.

One man's disgusting pig shit is another man's profitable pig shit.

------
Dirlewanger
Globalization: it works both ways! We can exploit rural Chinese and they can
exploit rural Americans.

~~~
fny
Exploitation? I thought this was the miracle of an unregulated free market
uplifting people from economic depravity.

Also the article does eventually make your point, but it's unfortunately
buried in the conclusion:

> American economic philosophy has long centered on the idea that deregulation
> is good for businesses, whose growth will provide jobs and prosperity, which
> will make America strong. But that thinking was based on the assumption that
> we would always be holding the big end of the globalization stick.

~~~
latch
Not your parent, but the verb "exploit" is frequently used in a non-negative
manner, especially when talking about natural resources. It simply means to
make use of.

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/exploit](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/exploit)

------
padseeker
This reminds me a bit about a story retold from the book Stangers in their Own
Land, a former oil worker who ratted out the oil industry dumping poison in
the water supply. And the coal industry in WV. There are people who will put
up with cancer causing chemicals for jobs, but dammnit any government control
is beyond the pale.

I don't know how you reason with these people. It's not limited to the
southern region of the US - it happens when people in PA and Upstate NY fight
over permissions for fracking on private land. However it does seem like
wherever there are knowledge economy opportunities people will prioritze
health and welfare, while in areas that are not as advanced will fight tooth
and nail to let these companies do what they want, even if it means it will
kill them. I can only shake my head.

------
089723645897236
The current method of hog farming is basically the worst possible version of
traditional farming evolved through technology. Quonset huts, gestation cages,
and fecal lagoons. Instead we could have mob grazing free range pig farming
integrated with agroforestry, leading to animal waste going directly where it
is the most useful i.e. as manure. Even the existing system could be set up to
use natural swamp permaculture techniques to filter the waste or even capture
in a biogas plant. Instead of lagoons of pig shit we could have useful forest
products and methane fuel. Monoculture hog farming is showing it's limits
environmentally and agronomically.

The barriers right now are the incumbent methods of farming subsidized by
BigGov on behalf of BigAg and BigChem, and the lack of suitable off the shelf
technology to make any of these ideas feasible for the average hog farmer.
Until then they are going to keep putting up quonset huts and digging shit
lagoons.

~~~
drak0n1c
Hog and wild boar grazing destroys ecosystems because they eat roots and even
tear up the roots of plants and trees they don't eat. Hawaii's forests are
being killed by boar
([http://hawaiianforest.com/wp/species/](http://hawaiianforest.com/wp/species/)).

The vision of Hog Cowboys is nice, but how do you ensure the grazing is light
and the hogs stay controlled? If they get loose feral boar is a completely
different beast than feral cow.

------
coldtea
> _Why Is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?_

Because of karma?

(Not to mention the "the developing world" as used in the phrase, is quite
snotty).

------
ggm
If you are blocked by trade wars from selling produce in an economy, but are
able to legally buy the means of production inside that economy, then whilst
it has lower direct employment outcomes to doing it at home, Surely as a
business and investment opportunity, it stands on it's own merits?

China has been buying farms in Australia for some time. Many people make
cynical comments about it, but it looks to me like a legal, and profitable way
of operating with Australia, as a foreign investment opportunity.

------
readhn
Very Easy solution: Classify this type of meat manufacturing business as
highly polluting and TAX it a lot until they become clean and green, ONLY then
lower taxes. Yes short term it will increase meat prices, so what? Folks will
be forced to eat more veggies which is a good thing.

~~~
moate
Oh man, you had a great point until you went off and decided to become a self-
righteous douche at the end there. Just couldn't stick the dismount...

To your point: I think the better mechanism isn't taxation, but
regulation/fines. And there was regulation in place, but one of the points of
the articles is that government officials in these areas 1- tend to be
controlled by these massive industries and 2- push legislation to gut the
regulations in the interest of "job creation" (read- increased corporate
profits)

~~~
readhn
Fines do not work. Look at the banking sector: HSBC, JP etc. they get slapped
with fines all the time but continue business as usual.

Heavy taxation is a very quick way to make these types of socially and
environmentally polluting business to change or to go away all together.

~~~
Clubber
Fines do work, but they have to hurt. If people only got fined $1.00 for
speeding rather than the usual $300, there'd be a hell of a lot more speeders.
With the banks and investment institutions, the fines are typically only a
small percentage of what the net of the move was. ($1.00 vs $300).

Of course fines, only work so much. People still used drugs during the 80s and
90s when punishment was over the top (and still is).

~~~
HillaryBriss
it's also important to consider the probability of actually being fined.

if the fine for using a freeway's high occupancy vehicle lane without any
passengers in your car is over $350 but the police rarely ticket violators,
you get Los Angeles.

------
pjc50
Bizarre headline. North Carolina has been an agricultural extractive export
economy with all that goes along with that since the founding of the state.
This isn't China, this is NC doing it to itself.

It doesn't help that NC has developing world levels of corrupt gerrymandered
politics.

~~~
dang
We've changed that title to the (presumably) more representative subtitle.

------
mido22
I don't care what the article says, couldn't the headline have used "shit",
"bad" or anything else instead of "developing world"? (despite being thick-
skinned) I find it offensive

~~~
moate
Sure, but the idea of "developing economies" is an actual thing in economic
theory. And what the industries are doing is being exploitative in the same
way that many nations use globalization as a way to exploit poorer, less
established economic players.

There are nations who came to the globalization table later or who haven't put
together an economic plan that provides a high quality of living for their
citizens. What would you prefer we call those nations?

~~~
mido22
so you are saying USA provides high quality standard of living for all it's
citizens?

~~~
moate
let's just walk right past THAT straw man and get to the meat of the issue:
"Developing nation" as a slur.

The World Bank has said that "developing/developed" duality isn't fitting
anymore and now breaks nations into 4 catagories: Low, Lower Middle, Upper
Middle, and High income nations based on citizen income. The UN says that
there's no specific metrics for a Developed vs Developing nation, and uses the
terms for convenience.

There's no set specific definition of what a developing nation is, but
generally it's assumed that the types of things I mentioned in my last post
(higher quality of life, more money, as well as higher life expectancy, lower
birth rate) are associated with Developed nations. MOST people agree these
things are good, and MOST people assume that the absence of them is therefor
bad.

The point of the title of the article is that deregulation has allowed a
Developed nation to contain pockets that look more like a less developed
country with less regulation, more exploitative labor, lower overall income,
and little regard for the health of its citizens. A quick way to say that
would be that it looks more like a developing nation.

------
svrtknst
Well.. Between the economy, the health sector, the infrastructure, the
political developments, the education, the state of civil rights, the
widespread religious influences at all levels of society and a culture of
armed violence ...

Who's to say that the US, by and large, _isn 't_ a developing nation?

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
develop...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-developing-
nation-regressing-economy-poverty-donald-trump-mit-economist-peter-
temin-a7694726.html)

~~~
ben_w
I’m British. I’ve visited the USA a few times (CA, NY(C), MA, RI properly, a
few more incidentally), and also Kenya.

Many of my fellow British say similar things about the UK as you say about the
USA, unfairly in both cases.

Once you see a place that really _is_ developing, it becomes clear how
advanced our nations are. We complain about potholes, they complain the road
fell off when it rained. We complain about civil rights, they have to deal
with post-election violence. We complain about our schools, they only got free
high schools a decade ago.

------
jernfrost
Oh man, the irony of America turning into the dumping ground of the world. As
other countries get richer they seem to start caring more about the
environment, poor people, national health etc.

The US in contrast seem to regress. It seems to be heading back to the dirty
old days of the industrial revolution with high income inequality, poor
enironment protection, an unhealthy underclass.

It is bizzare watching a country deliberately turning itself into the 3rd
world.

