Officials from the CDC and USDA will likely arrive in Mexico soon to
help investigate the deadly new influenza virus that managed to jump
from pigs to people in a previously unseen mutated form that can readily
spread among humans.
One of the first things they will want to look at are the hundreds of
industrial-scale hog facilities that have sprung up around Mexico in
recent years, and the thousands of people employed inside the crowded,
pathogen-filled confinement buildings and processing plants.
Industry calls these massive compounds "confined animal feeding
operations," or CAFOs (KAY-fohs), though most people know them simply as
"factory farms." You have seen them before while flying: Long white
buildings lined up in tightly packed rows of three, four or more. Within
each confinement, thousands of pigs are restricted to indoor pens and
grain-fed for market, while breeding sows are kept in small metal crates
where they spend most of their lives pregnant or nursing piglets.
In the last several years, U.S. hog conglomerates have opened giant
swine CAFOs south of the border, including dozens around Mexico City in
the neighboring states of Mexico and Puebla. Smithfield Foods also
reportedly operates a huge swine facility in the State of Veracruz. Many
of these CAFOs raise tens of thousands of pigs at a time. Cheaper labor
costs and a desire to enter the Latin American market are drawing more
industrialized agriculture to Mexico all the time, wiping out smaller,
traditional farms, which now account for only a small portion of swine
production in Mexico.
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