December 21, 2000
		Legal Assault Waged Against Factory Hog Farms Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., president of the New York-based environmental advocacy organization Water Keeper Alliance, announced on December 6 a coalition of non-profit activist groups aimed at launching a "broad legal assault" against the corporate hog industry. They have assembled a team of private sector attorneys and law firms to hold factory farms responsible for the environmental damage they incur, and to try to enforce stricter adherence to existing environmental laws. Among the legal team enlisted in the battle against factory hog farming are some lawyers who successfully sued the tobacco industry. "What we're dealing with here is a crime," Kennedy said of the corporate hog industry. "It's an assault on American communities and our natural resources." Kennedy said that this coalition was necessary because federal and state authorities have been unable or unwilling to hold these factories to pollution control. He put the onus on Republican lawmakers who gutted the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency by approximately 50 percent when Newt Gingrich took office as speaker of the House of Representatives. Kennedy also stated at the news conference in Washington that several states, such as North Carolina and Indiana, have endured an "almost total collapse of state enforcement" against corporate hog farms and that many that have opted to "lower their environmental standards, and to recruit polluters into the state with the promise of a few years of pollution based prosperity." "Federal environmental prosecution against the meat industry has effectively ceased because Congress has eviscerated the EPA's enforcement budget, while the political clout of powerful pork producers has trumped state enforcement efforts," Kennedy said. "This collapse of environmental enforcement has allowed corporate hog factories to proliferate with huge pollution based profits." "We went to them because we believe that the private bar is the only place that citizens can go for redress, because there's so much money going into the political process that it has become paralyzed in its ability to protect Americans from pollution," Kennedy said. "This historic assemblage of legal talent will fill in the vacancy left by the government's failure to prosecute and confront these polluters with the most formidable threat they've ever faced." The team of lawyers will use a variety of approaches to attempt to force the corporate hog farm industry to comply with state and federal laws, including class action lawsuits. Kennedy's coalition maintains that corporate hog farms violate environmental laws by dumping hog waste into the United States' waterways. This waste is often stored in lagoons as large as ten acres in area, and also contains an abundance of antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides and other toxic substances, and this gets discharged into rivers, aquifers and public waterways. Additionally, fecal lagoon discharges have killed and poisoned billions of fish, and air pollution has made life miserable for any who live within a reasonable vicinity of a factory hog farm. "These are not farms - they are industrial operations and need to be held to the same standards as any other industry," said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. "Thousands of miles of our nation's rivers and streams have been contaminated by runoff of animal feces, and the foul stench makes life miserable for those unfortunate enough to live nearby. One of the first polluters Kennedy's group brought a lawsuit against is the Smithfield Foods Company, the largest hog producer and processor in the world. In June, the coalition was among a group of plaintiffs which filed a nuisance charge against Smithfield. Richard Poulson, Smithfield's vice president, called the suit "nothing but a publicity stunt designed to raise money for out of state activist groups." "Kennedy and his cohorts make the preposterous claim that the pork industry is responsible for North Carolina's water pollution problems," Poulson said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."