The Union Farmer Quarterly/Fall 2001

Organizations like the Hog Watch coalition in Manitoba suffer from no such ambivalence on the subject of mega-barns. Farmers, environmentalists and concerned citizens, they know which side they're on, and they're fighting back.

Hog Watch Manitoba was formed in 2000 in response to the provincial government's plan to double hog production in the province by encouraging ILOs. The NFU, the Winnipeg Humane Society, the Choices Coalition for Social Justice, and other groups saw that plan as government collusion in the corporate take-over of agriculture, in absolute opposition to community and citizen interests. By joining together as Hog Watch, they have been able to mount a strong campaign of information, research, lobbying, and support for grass-roots community action against hog mega-barns. (They can be reached through the NFU office or through their website at www.hogwatchmanitoba.org)

"Communities have to develop their own resources," says the NFU's Fred Tait, who chairs the Hog Watch coalition. "It can't be centrally organized; you don't have any impact coming in from the outside. But we can offer assistance. And what they manage to do astounds me. People who've never been involved in things before come forward. They work together across political lines, do their research, find resources... Six or eight weeks after their first meeting they're ready to take on their municipal government. We're really talking about the development of local democracy."

As the Ste Marie story and hundreds of others show, fighting megabarns is not for the faint of heart. But all across Canada, communities are taking up the challenge when they see their quality of life and their livelihoods threatened by this phenomenon.

In Quebec, people have been battling the "pork barons" through most of the past decade. Many of those battles were lost, but some were won. Early in 1999, for example, the people of Grandes-Piles near Trois Rivieres reached an out-of-court settlement with a subsidiary of Shurgain to actually close a three-barn complex and prohibit its future use for livestock. The citizens had worked for four years to persuade the six affected municipalities to make common cause with them and oppose the hog factories.

The Sauver les Campagnes ("Save the Countryside") Coalition was born out of the connections people made between communities fighting mega-barns. Now that coalition in turn has given birth to Quebec's new Union Paysanne, which we expect will soon be our sister organization in Via Campesina.

In Ontario the informal network of local groups has grown in the wake of the Walkerton tragedy. The Sierra Club-sponsored ILO conference last March in London provided a valuable boost of energy and established or strengthened many vital connections among issues and people in the province and beyond. The NFU's Region 3 is playing a strong role in the collective effort to find ways to favour independent family farms and to control and discourage mega-barns.

Meanwhile, municipal councils continue to try to control the expansion of ILOs through zoning by-laws and caps on animal numbers and densities. The Chief Administrative Officer of Middlesex County in southern Ontario recently proposed an industrial tax rate for agricultural buildings above a given assessed value - in other words, for ILOs. The industrial tax rate would be something like 13 times the agricultural rate for the same building. The stated objective is to collect taxes to more adequately offset the heavy demands that ILOs make on municipal resources. One imagines that such a measure might also have a deterrent effect.

Informal networks are growing in Saskatchewan and Alberta as well. The fight against the Taiwan Corporation and other mega-livestock projects is an uphill struggle, but the NFU and its fellow opponents continue to press for regulatory and marketing measures which would at least lessen the damage.

One of the many impressive accomplishments of Hog Watch Manitoba is the organizing kit it has assembled for rural residents preparing campaigns against the construction of factory farms. Research papers with valuable background and details are accompanied by a one-page list of specific practical suggestions, beginning with "Obtain municipal by-laws... obtain the proposal and compare it to provincial guidelines... check previous council minutes..." It gives phone numbers and website addresses for key provincial documents, advice for contacting neighbouring property owners, hints for attending local council meetings, and pointers for making the case aganist the barn.

Such grass-roots organization can make all the difference. In Europe, an aware and outraged public is pushing the big mega-barn companies and their small-time counterparts out of their territories. The same thing has started to happen in the US, and now here in Canada. We must continue to build the opposition to ILOs, and strengthen the movement to reclaim our countryside.

Nor is Canada the last frontier. As these champions of agribusiness run into increasing opposition in North America, they are already eying places like Argentina and Brazil as sites for their next expansion. When we understand the global nature of this phenomenon, we are better equipped to oppose it, not only in our own back yards but everywhere it appears.