As the Pakistani military continued its offensive to stop the advance of Taliban insurgents on Thursday, the United States was putting intense new pressure on the Pakistani government.
As that country battles the militants, President Obama said last night he was gravely concerned about the stability of the government as it tries to gain support of the Pakistani people. All of this comes just days before President Asif Ali Zardari visits Washington next week.
Teresita Schaffer, director of the South Asia program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, joins Martin Savidge to discuss Pakistan’s offensive and security concerns over the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Mexico’s Health Minister José Angel Córdova announced today that Government of Mexico has ordered all nonessential activity of the federal government and private business to cease for a five day period in an effort to contain the swine flu epidemic. The decision came as global health authorities warned that the swine flu was threatening to bloom into a pandemic. Friday is May Day which is a holiday in Mexico so the closure is in effect just a two day ‘forced holiday’. All nonessential private businesses must also close for that period but essential services like transport, supermarkets, trash collection, hospital will remain open.
As of Monday the daily economic impact of the epidemic was costing Mexico City alone $57 million USD. Mexico’s central bank warned the outbreak will likely deepen the nation’s recession, hurting an economy that was already hit hard by the global financial crisis. Mexico’s economy shrank 8 percent in the first quarter year-over-year. Clearly the impact to the Mexican economy and its ripple effect across the globe will continue to mount. Egypt, for example, took the highly unusual step of ordering its entire 400,000 swine herd culled sparking riots among Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The order hits the the slum-dwelling Zebaleen rubbish collectors who rely on the hogs for their livelihood. The Zebaleen feed their animals with a country’s food scraps. The war on the poor often finds the flimsy of excuses and Egypt’s response, widely condemned, is little more than an assault on a beleaguered minority.
Empire, a new programme from Al Jazeera, examines the path from Iraq to Afghanistan and into Pakistan. With the Iraq operation apparently drawing to a close and a mini-surge underway in Afghanistan, people in the region are wondering what this will all mean on the ground and what will the repercussions be for the region. As locals worry that they will be caught in the crossfire or killed by drones, experts question whether the strategy is the correct one or if it is too little, too late. Empire investigates what went wrong and the Obama plan to fix it.
Richard Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state, has told Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi that the conflict in Afghanistan may be “spinning out of control”.
Mr. Armitage, who served in the Bush Administration, also said it was “a little backward” of Barack Obama, the US president, to send thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan before he completed a review of US policy on the region.
In a wide-ranging interview he began by answering a question on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On February 17, 2009, Smithfield Foods acquired Vall, a hog producer, for $60.7 million, solidifying its position as the nation’s number one producer of pork products. The company boasts over $12 billion in total sales. The company’s growth has been nothing short of spectacular. Since 1990, Smithfield Foods has grown by more than 1,000 percent. In 1997 it was the nation’s seventh-largest pork producer; by 1999 it was the largest. Today, it accounts for 27% of hog production in the United States, doubled what it accounted for just three years ago.
Based in Virginia, Smithfield has embarked on aggressive acquisition strategy to fuel its growth. While the company has production facilities across the US as well as overseas most of its operations are in the southeastern region of North Carolina. Smithfield raised 14 million hogs in 2006. This tremendous population of hogs enabled Smithfield to produce about 3.1 billion pounds of fresh pork in 2006. In 2001, Smithfield expanded into the beef industry and it is already the nation’s 5th leading beef producer. The Smithfield family of brands consists of over 50 brands and 21 major subsidiaries. Smithfield employs 52,500 people globally, including 11,000 in North Carolina. In addition, Smithfields acquired the Butterball turkey brand.
Founded in 1936 in Smithfield, Virginia, Smithfield Foods overcame financial difficulties in the 1970s under the leadership of Joseph W. Luter III, its combative CEO until he retired a year ago. Mr. Luter began an expansion of the company during the early 1980s that continues through today. Since 1981, Smithfield Foods has made more than 30 acquisitions both domestically and internationally. Smithfield owns subsidiaries in France, Poland, Romania and the United Kingdom, and has joint ventures or major investments in Brazil, Mexico, Spain and China. Like many of the other major players in the industry, they are making a major push into the emerging Japanese pork market and of course the ever alluring Chinese market, the world’s largest consumer of pork products.
Militants in northwestern Pakistan have been making major gains, creeping closer to the capital city of Islamabad. There have even been fears voiced that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could in danger.
In recent weeks, top U.S. officials have been critical of Pakistani officials for not moving aggressively enough against the militants. This week, Pakistan’s military went on the offensive against the Taliban and recaptured a key town in the strategic Buner district, just 60 miles from Islamabad.
Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the situation in Pakistan, whether this offensive is just a way to appease frustrated American officials and what the administrations next steps should be.
Al Jazeera reports on Iceland’s new political landscape and the country’s search for a new economic roadmap. Clearly, self-regulating free market ideology seems destined for the trash bin of history.
The United States is the world’s second largest pork producer and pork production has been growing at quite a clip. From 2000 through 2006, US pork production expanded 15.8%. Only China, the world’s largest pork producer and consumer, grew faster. When it comes to the global pork trade, China distorts the picture only because it is so dominant. In 2006, China accounted for 48% of total world hog production.
Over the last 20 years, the number of backyard hog farms in China has gradually declined, but backyard hog operations still dominate in both the number of hog farms and share of total pork production in China. Still the trend is towards industrial hog production in what is termed a confined animal feeding operation or CAFO. Indeed, the Chinese budget for 2008-09 allocates 2.8 billion yuan from to support live pig production to build breeding farms and standard large scale piggeries. If the experience with CAFOs of the United States and now Mexico is any indication, China is unwittingly creating an environmental and health disaster. Still this is for the future, it is the present that should concern us.
Today the Mexican Health Secretary, José Ángel Córdova, reported that tests now prove that a four-year-old boy contracted swine flu in the La Gloria community of Veracruz state, where that community has been protesting pollution from a CAFO that isn’t so confined. These tests now put the start date for the swine flu epidemic at least two weeks earlier than the first death previously confirmed by the Mexican government and more importantly begins to pinpoint the start of the epidemic in La Gloria. The CAFO is run by Granjas Carroll de México which is a joint venture of Agroindustrias Unidas de México and Smithfield Foods.
On Monday, in response to a growing swine flu epidemic, the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert level from three to four. Beyond Mexico, the United States and five other countries were dealing with confirmed cases of the flu. Martin Blaser of the New York University School of Medicine discusses the scope of the outbreak and how world governments are responding.
State and federal officials intensified their response to the swine flu outbreak on Tuesday, with President Obama asking Congress for $1.5 billion in supplemental funding and New York reporting two new potential clusters at local schools.
The global response included more restrictions on travel to and from Mexico, the origin of the outbreak and the only country to have reported deaths from swine flu. Officials there shut down schools across the country and limited restaurant service in Mexico City in an effort to curb transmission of the virus, which has killed at least 152.
Israel confirmed its first two cases of swine flu, which is now in at least seven countries. Ten others including China and Russia, which were set to quarantine passengers suspected of having the flu, are investigating possible cases.
Dr. Richard Besser, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, termed the early days of swine flu in the United States as a “pre-pandemic period” and was blunt about the potential impact of this influenza.
“As this moves forward,” Dr. Besser said, “I fully expect that we will see deaths from this infection.”
He said that five people confirmed to have swine flu had been hospitalized in the United States — two in Texas and three in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency. Still, the nation’s highest number of cases continued to be in New York City, where 44 people were confirmed to have swine flu.