AlterMedia International

The New York Times: By DOREEN CARVAJAL and STEPHEN CASTLE

CENEI, ROMANIA — For centuries — from the Hapsburg Empire through Communist dictatorship — peasant farmers here have eked a living from hogs, driving horses along ancient pocked roads and whispering ritual prayers on butchering day.

Old customs and jobs are dying and the air itself is changing, however, transformed by an American newcomer, Smithfield Foods. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage.

The upheaval in the hog farm belts of Poland and Romania, the two largest E.U. members in Eastern Europe, ranks among the Continent’s biggest agricultural transformations.

It also offers a window on how a Fortune 500 company based in Virginia operates in far-flung outposts. Smithfield has a joint venture in a Mexican hog farm located near where United Nations scientists are investigating a potential link between pigs and the new strain of influenza in humans. With the exact origins of the virus still in doubt, Smithfield emphasizes that the disease has struck none of its hogs or employees.

But Smithfield’s global approach is clear; its chairman, Joseph Luter III, has described it as moving in a “very, very big way, very, very fast.” In less than five years, Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania, tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs.

It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.

In the United States, Smithfield says it has been a boon to consumers. Pork prices dropped by about one-fifth between 1970 and 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggesting annual savings of about $29 per consumer.

In Eastern Europe, as in American farm states where Smithfield developed its business strategy, the question is whether the savings are worth the considerable costs. The company says it is “sensitive to our neighbors’ concerns” and that complaints are often from disgruntled residents left behind.

But Robert Wallace, a visiting professor of geography at the University of Minnesota says Smithfield’s global rise is part of a broader “livestock revolution that has created cities of pigs and chickens” in poorer nations with weaker regulations. “The price tag goes up for small farmers.”

In Romania, the number of hog farmers has declined 90 percent — to 52,100 in 2007 from 477,030 in 2003 — according to European Union statistics, with ex-farmers, overwhelmed by Smithfield’s lower prices, often emigrating or shifting to construction. In their place, the company employs or contracts with about 900 people and buys grain from about 100 farmers.

Read more nytimes.com

Ireland needs to bring its politics closer to Brussels.

Amid the slow death of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU, the Czech senate’s approval yesterday (6 May) of the Lisbon treaty has moved the EU one step closer to a dénouement of its long-running political drama over institutional reform. Now only the signature of Václav Klaus, the Czech president, is necessary to complete ratification of the treaty in one of the three Lisbon-resistant member states. The notoriously Eurosceptic Klaus will no doubt use every legal and political instrument at his disposal to defer signing the treaty, which he claims threatens national sovereignty. But, like Poland’s similarly Eurosceptic President Lech Kaczyński, he will have no political excuse for delay if the Irish people at last approve the treaty in the referendum that is expected in October.

An Irish rejection in this second vote – following the ‘No’ vote last June – would spell the death of the Lisbon treaty. It would also prevent, for the foreseeable future, any further efforts at comprehensive reform of the EU’s institutions.

The stakes in the Irish referendum are high. Much higher than recognised by careless politicians who claim that a second Irish rejection of the treaty would merely mean the end of the current relationship that Ireland enjoys with the EU. That view ignores the impact of a second Irish rejection on the presidents of Poland and the Czech Republic, looking for any reason to put down the pens that they are reluctantly holding over the foot of the document.

Read More EuropeanVoice.com