Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US | Hacker News Reader

Lax regulation made it cheaper for China to outsource pork production to the US

rollingstone.com

142 pointsshalmanese71 comments

> 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...

And if you read Chinese: http://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/cyxw/2016-04-07/doc-ifxr...

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.

> 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

People want government to do its job properly and to not overreach that. It's no more surreal than people here wanting net neutrality enforced through government regulation while blacking out their sites to protest SOPA.

I don't know, but I have noticed that among the Republican types I have in my circle of friends, a surprisingly large number of them work for a government either directly or indirectly. Same thoughts about cognitive dissonance.

us control on corn, means feeding stock is cheaper in the us too, somebody may think its stupid to subsidize corn, but the truth be told is that the us control the world not because the army or the us dollar, its because the food.

Mexico saw that while negotiating the nafta, most of our corn and beans come from the us, we are handcuffed on the table, because in the case of a trade war, the us can impose taxes on most of our products, but the main product we import is food from the us, and we cant tax those higher, because our people need it.

so while the us taxes washing machines from mexico, mexico cant tax the corn.

the same is happening with the trade war trump is driving between the us and china, china cant retalliate taxing pork or corn, because thats what people eats...

kyssinger said it better: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people."

so thats the reason the us subsidize farming

>so thats the reason the us subsidize farming

It may be true that subsidizing corn has the controlling effect you talk about. But I assure you, there is no higher level thinking going on here. The US subsidizes corn for one reason alone. And that is the powerful corn lobby that uses the old idea of a small town farmer to rally voters and strike fear in the heart of any politician who dares oppose corn/farm subsidies.

+1. eddie knows what's up!

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.

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.

I'm from NC too. I didn't really interpret those words in that context as implying low intelligence. Some people in NC do really talk that way. The stereotype that people who talk like that aren't educated or intelligent is a big problem, but I didn't interpret OPs comment as reinforcing that problem. It was a pretty accurate description of something people in NC hear often from a certain type of southerner. I interpreted it more as a "slice of life" or Mark Twain-esque description of informal speech to bring readers in. Readers can certainly bring their own prejudices in, but thats on them. I certainly don't doubt that we have very intelligent people in all parts. Heck, the one person I know from a hog producing family is very intelligent. Though you wont find a stronger voice against hog farming and the pollution and health problems it causes than her.

I'm just worried that by saying it's not ok to use aspects of southern dialect when describing southerners, that we reinforce the idea that there is something "wrong " with that dialect and are erasing a part of the local culture so it doesn't offend mainstream taste.

I would never say it's not ok to document regional speech patterns. My point was that the GP comment went past documenting and into mocking (IMO). That's what I take issue with personally.

I took it as mocking. And I'd wager a hefty sum that I am right.

OP here- not mocking, going for the Mark Twain "slice of life" approach.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Growing up in the south and not having a southern accent was REAL fun in school. Kids are evil.

The NYC people that judge you are obviously not "tolerant".

Also most stereotypes have some truth to them, otherwise they wouldn't be stereotypes.

E.g. IIRC Southern states come last in education ranking.

Actually, poor areas all over the US come up last in education rankings. Your poorest areas in Los Angeles or NYC will rival or underperform the poorest areas in the south.

And your wealthy southern suburbs will outperform or rival any posh LA or NYC school district.

Southern states are the most predominately black states in the country. Are you sure you want to bring this up?

I've seen subcultures in NYC that are like that, but the majority subcultures are not IMHO.

Try hanging out with more diverse typical immigrant and native lower middle class to middle class new yorkers, not just other several-generation upper middle class suburban new englanders and transplants from the midwest and rest of the country which are a minority in NYC... You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Basically, hang out with non software tech people :)

Thanks for making this point. People who would never even consider mocking the speech patterns of immigrants will fall all over themselves to denigrate southerners, thier speech and deplorable, to some, religious beliefs.

They are probably mocking their hypocritical, not "deplorable" religious beliefs.

That word IME is not used by anybody but the people complaining about it.

E.g. Judge Roy Moore in Alabama.

That really is the way it sounds (at least to my ears). Accent is unrelated to intelligence. The only person here making that connection is you.

How about this:

> 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!"

vs.

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 that this is how they've always done it and that they don't want the government telling them what they can and can't do with their land.

By fabricating a direct quote purporting to be from a local hog farmer you are pointing out the dialect difference to put them into a group of people that are stereotyped as lower intelligence. You are meant to read that in your internal 'dumb southerner' accent and chuckle at how backwards they are in your opinion.

For you to say "Accent is unrelated to intelligence" is great and I commend you on that outlook. Unfortunately, a large portion of the crowd online doesn't share your enlightened view. For them, only ignorant people speak like that. By using that 'quote' to highlight the speech pattern, they are attempting to disparage the quotee and their peer group.

And at the same time, it tries to invalidate the point of view being expressed. They don't want the government over regulating their business. Something that many, even in this forum agree with. But only in their own area of expertise.

Regulation for thee but not for me.

There's a lot to say about how ya'll're jumpin' to conclusions on intelgence 'sif ya'll was a buncha nucular scientist. But that's not my intention. I just wanna note:

A nasal accent caused by elevated exposition to manure would be literally dumb -- some phonemes are silent. That's funny in a cynical way and even if that's nothing to laughe at, it's noteworthy.

There's also the thing about the mere mention of bad things invariably eliciting negative emotions, which is why we have curse words, and perhaps why farmers don't wanna take shit from noone. And there's the disphemism-treadmil, which is why, IMHO, the substitution of curse words for clinical terms is a vain effort.

This whole subthread is purely about NC and language, so it's rather off-topic.

No, I'm pointing out an association seen all across the internet unfortunately. This one was just the final straw for me. Any time someone wants to back-handedly disparage someone's intellect, they love to use words like 'gubment' or some variation. FWIW, I also take issue with the usage of 'Murica' as well as a blanket indicator. You are calling into question a person's intellect when using terminology like that and claiming otherwise is being dishonest to either yourself or everyone else. That being said, I fully understand that some people do actually speak like that due to regional dialects and documenting that in text is fine if that is your actual intent.

The words you're looking for are, "smells like money".

The wealthy/corps who distribute/buy don't care because they don't live there... working farmers know nothing else that will keep their family on the middleclass treadmill (education is right out) without the externalities of stench and pollution, while the working poor (closest to the animals and carcasses) couldn't find another job without uprooting their extended family.

It's a simple living that most communities couldn't stomach. One day there will be a virus or bacteria that will wipe it out, but until then you won't take away their lifestyle. It's all they know.

I wonder if their grandparents also used copious amounts of antibiotics on their animals...

Antibiotic use in livestock became prevelant in the late 50s, so yes. In fact, they probably used more back then because it was yet to be discovered that it was causing resistance issues.

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.

"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.

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!!?!

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.

But it sounds like most are not doing that, and are content with allowing that pig shit to run into the water supply.

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

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.

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

>But that thinking was based on the assumption that we would always be holding the big end of the globalization stick.

"We" being owners, not workers: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2016/05/W160...

If fossil fuel was priced accurately (with regard to its harm) this might have never been an issue.

As jobs and talent have flocked to American cities, once-prosperous rural communities are finding their primary competitive advantages are desperate residents willing to work cheap, and local Republicans ready to extend tax breaks and slash regulation.
American companies have long taken advantage of these trends.

A leaked report from the 1980s, which was prepared for a waste-management company seeking a community for "locally undesirable land use," listed the "least resistant personality profile" as: "longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest," "conservative," "Republican" and "advocates of the free market."

Yes exactly. And rural areas have lots in common -- education levels, availability of labor, economic and political incentives for development, etc. The only things that really vary are availability/reliability of power & natural resources, and regulations that may help (e.g. ability to legally enforce contracts with vendors) / hinder (environmental, labor, etc) business.

And when we decide this is an inconvenient arrangement and no longer in the national interest, we'll just steal the asset back from China against their will with minimum or no compensation, like they routinely do to Western corporations (see: Yahoo & Ant Financial). That's how it works, right?

You mean nationalize a resource owned and 90% of value extracted by a foreign state-connected entity? You can only do that if you can withstand a war, coup or astroturfed revolution.

And it seems after the Arab Spring, you don't even need to do step 1 anymore. Got Putin quaking since 2011.

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.

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.

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/).

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.

>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).

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.

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.

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)

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.

So we don't want to punish the well run farms that don't pollute. But you can't "tax" only the offenders, because that's just...a fine. It's a punitive financial incentive when you pollute, that's regulation and fines. You can make the fines extreme so that people won't ignore them, but they're still not taxes.

I think we're just arguing semantics over what the difference between a fine and a tax are.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

Agreed. There is a very condescending implication that in "developing countries" everything universally is shitty.

We changed the title above.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am not blaming HN of anything. I am just sad about rollingstone's opinion about developing nations.

That was clear! We just try to respond to title complaints so readers who come by later understand when we changed the title.

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...

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.

Please don't take a baity title as an excuse to pour fuel on national/political flames on HN. That's exactly what we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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