Fattened for the Kill

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

In Haitian Creole the word for pig and bank is the same.

For almost a century, the indigenous Haitian pig had been the poor's most valued asset. Cheap to feed and easy to raise the Creole pig was literally the peasants’ "savings bank”— an asset that could be converted to cash when times were tough. They also aerated the soil; kept sanitation levels stable by eating household waste which they then turned into nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Even a vegetarian had to admire the virtues of Haiti's little black pig.

But that was decades ago.

When the latest swine flu scare erupted in Mexico the American pork industry shuddered. Pork lobbyists flocked to the halls of Congress desperate to assure the bacon loving public that their meat was safe to eat. Meanwhile in Egypt 300,000 pigs were being slaughtered.

Under pressure, the W.H O. responded: the virus was to be referred to not as the swine flu but rather the N1H1 virus. No doubt the poor in Haiti heard this and shook their heads. If only they had lobbyists back in 1983. Maybe they would not be here left eating mud.

In 1983 a rash of swine flu was reported in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. Supposedly afraid that the disease would affect its own pork industry the U.S. ordered its puppet Baby Doc Duvalier to eradicate the Haitian Creole pig or it would "shut down the country".

The Haitian peasant was given a choice: kill your pig or be buried beside it. But before you think the U.S. government heartless know that the Haitians were given white Iowa pigs as compensation. Only one problem... well actually two ... the fat white pig could not take Haiti's heat... or the spartan diet.

The peasants tried everything: they arranged to have special concrete houses to keep their new pigs cool (which the Duvalier government made them pay for). But the Iowa pig does not eat just anything. Special feed had to be imported but at the cost of about $100 per-year-per-pig the new white pigs were eating up more than a poor black peasant could ever expect to make.

There is a double irony to this allegory on race and modern capitalism. The white Iowa pigs had been kept fat by being drastically confined while the little black pigs had been free to forage. In order to keep their pigs from succumbing to disease (pigs have extremely efficient metabolisms) they were pumped with cocktails of prophylactic antibiotics.

As reported by Nick Kristof the consequence, besides the tainted excrement being absorbed in our soil and water supply, has been an outbreak of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) known as a “flesh-eating bacteria.” In 2005 the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans each year, more than were currently dying from AIDS.

Well, I suppose it beats eating mud...