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The New York Times publică un articol despre modelul de afaceri al firmei Smithfield Foods. O altă firmă care şi-a delocalizat producţia în locuri în care mâna de lucru este ieftină, politicianul uşor de cumpărat şi legile laxe, aproximativ aplicate. Autorii pun faţă în faţă monstrul capitalist cu micii fermieri, care se văd obligaţi să dea faliment, neputând face faţă concurenţei.

Articolul, extrem de obiectiv, descrie şi modul în care politicieni români au sprijinit firma. Citez:

"HELP AT HIGH LEVELS

When it first arrived in Eastern Europe, Smithfield courted top politicians in both Poland and Romania, the latter a particularly poor country of 23 million with a weak government and under constant E.U. pressure over corruption. In the post-Communist disorder, it is essential to know your way about. In Bucharest, Smithfield turned to Nicholas Taubman, a wealthy Republican businessman who was the U.S. ambassador to Romania during the administration of President George W. Bush. Mr. Taubman escorted Smithfield’s top executives during meetings with the Romanian president and prime minister and president. “I’m from Virginia and they’re a large corporation and I know them very well,” Mr. Taubman said, noting that he had also helped Ford Motor, which had an easier time in Romania because it had the support of a government minister. Once the top leaders in Romania showed their support for Smithfield, developments fell into place; about a dozen Smithfield farms were designed by an architectural firm owned by Gheorghe Seculici, a former deputy prime minister with close ties to President Traian Basescu of Romania, who is godfather to his daughter. Further help came from a familiar front: Smithfield’s lobbyist, the Virginia firm McGuireWoods, set up a Bucharest office in 2007 to liaise between Smithfield and the Romanian government. In many ways McGuireWoods was the perfect choice; it had also represented Romania for three years to press its NATO-membership campaign. Mr. Basescu, the president, was not shy in acknowledging the company, which he praised at a joint news conference with President George W. Bush at a NATO summit meeting last year. Smithfield was also very visible in its appreciation: It contributed €20,000 to pay for Romanian ceremonial uniforms at the summit meeting, according to the Foreign Ministry. Mr. Taubman said that access was vital. “It’s extremely difficult to do business there unless you have someone like the prime minister or someone in the prime minister’s office who reaches down to whomever is concerned and says this is what to do,” he said. As straightforward as that may seem, lobbying on the part of a big firm from the United States — the superpower that East Europeans seek to please — raised some eyebrows. “We understand public diplomacy and political lobbying,” noted Steen Steensen, an agriculture expert at the Danish Embassy, whose country has also expanded hog farms into Eastern Europe. ‘’But we trust that the business and commercial channels operate in a normal and fair way.” “Smithfield’s dominance and manifest aggressive approach is worrying,” Mr. Steensen said in one agricultural report. "

Există şi un capitol dedicat problemelor de mediu generate de complexul de lângă Timişoara. Îl reproduc şi pe el, pentru că nu văd unde se află acuzaţia că România se află la originea gripei porcine. Vedeţi şi altceva: românul ştie, nu ştie, îşi dă cu părerea.

"ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS

The connections in the upper reaches of government meant that Smithfield could weather protests from local communities. The company was fined €9,000 for spilling manure on a local highway while transporting waste from a leaking container; €35,000 for a leaking bin that seeped hog waste into soil; another €35,000 for four farms operating without permits in Arad County; and €18,500 for not preventing water pollution.

Some villagers, however, concentrate on the advantages. “I have land near them and there’s no problem,” Dorin Mic Aurel, mayor of Masloc, said. Smithfield is the biggest taxpayer in Masloc, contributing $27,000 yearly that helped bring running water to the village.

But Smithfield found it hard to overcome fallout from the swine fever outbreak that struck Cenei. At the time, hog corpses lay in heaps, and residents remember chaotic efforts to shoot and burn them. That particular strain affects only hogs, but scientists have found elements of swine viruses — one from Europe or Asia, the other from North America — in the genetic code of the new influenza A(H1N1) virus.

When Ioan Ciprian Ciurdar, deputy mayor of Cenei, said that the stench from nearby farms was overpowering, Smithfield responded that a heat wave was to blame. Mr. Ciurdar said that he had visited the farm with a colleague who snapped photographs until a security guard demanded the camera and destroyed the pictures. “If you’re an owner,” he said, his voice rising, “it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want.”

Smithfield contends that “it is impossible to know” why the pigs got sick, while noting a breakdown in the supply of government-supplied swine flu vaccines. But several officials on both sides of the debate believe that Smithfield was overwhelmed by its own industrial machine and its ever multiplying pigs.

“Thousands of piglets were born,” Mr. Seculici, the architect, said. “There was no place to put them because the new farms weren’t finished. Nobody admits this, but this was the cause of swine flu. They were forced to improvise.” Smithfield acknowledges that it placed young pigs on farms under construction, but insists that doing so had no impact on health. “It was done too fast; that caused a lot of problems,” Mr. Taubman, the former U.S. ambassador, said. When it came to cleanup, Smithfield again turned to special E.U. subsidies, requesting $11.5 million in compensation. But the local authorities — those with the power to dole out the money — balked at the demand, outraged that the epidemic was taking place on unlicensed farms which they accused of lax biosecurity measures.

A special mission of the European Commission confirmed some of their complaints, finding that Smithfield had failed to submit regular reports on the deaths of its pigs and that employees moved freely between farms despite suspicions of swine fever. “Although we acknowledge these dysfunctions, this does not mean that our farms were operating outside the purview of Romanian authorities,” Mr. Griffith, a lawyer for Smithfield, wrote. “Our farms were operating openly and in regular, day-today contact with those authorities.”

“When we discovered that a number of our farms in Romania were operating on an emergency basis without all required permits,” Mr. Griffith said, Smithfield acted “to obtain all required permits.” Blocked from collecting the money, Smithfield turned to Valeriu Tabara, head of the Romanian Parliament’s agricultural committee. With support from other politicians, Mr. Tabara pushed for an amendment that would enable animal owners to be compensated for disease-driven losses regardless of ignoring proper biosecurity measures.

Smithfield is uncertain if the amendment will be beneficial to the company. The revision, Mr. Griffith said, “would generally not apply retroactively to our claim.” Mr. Tabara has no doubts, however, saying that “Smithfield is in the category of companies that have registered losses.”

Ziarul NU acuză România că a exportat virusul gripei, ci spune că în structura virusului se află o secvenţă europeană sau asiatică. Cretinii de la Realitatea Tv manipulează. Dar cel mai grav mi se pare felul în care reacţionează oficiali guvernamentali, care NU au citit articolul! Un guvern mai de căcat nu puteam avea!

Dan Nica vrea să dea ziarul în judecată! Nu suntem destul în căcat? Un scandal cu NYTimes ne mai trebuia, că în rest aveam de toate!