If I had to pick one economic concept I wish everyone understood, it would be externalities. An externality is a side effect caused by some activity whose costs are not borne by whoever caused it. A classic example of a negative externality is smoke emitted by a factory that pollutes the air breathed by people who have nothing to do with the factory. Their health may be damaged as a result, but the factory owners have no incentive to clean up the smoke because doing nothing is the cheapest alternative, they’re not the ones being harmed by it, and capitalism is all about maximizing profits. The government could require the factory to do something about the smoke so people aren’t harmed by it, but since business interests are often favored over public health concerns, it’s unlikely to do so.
Enter Shawn Bannon’s documentary The Smell of Money. It’s aptly titled because while the immediate subject of the film is pollution from industrial hog farms, the story behind the story is all about money and how money translates into power. It’s also about race, because the film focuses on North Carolina, where industrial hog farms are concentrated in areas that had a high prevalence of slavery in 1860 and have a high percentage of African American residents today. That’s environmental racism: the pollution created by hog farming is disproportionately inflicted on people of color. Some of those people, like Elsie Herring of Duplin County, NC, live on land that’s been owned by their families for more than 100 years, yet their interests are slighted by public officials in favor of corporations who are much more recent arrivals in the area.
Raising hogs produces a lot of waste because that’s how mammals work. Hog waste can be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner, as is required in many European countries, but it’s cheaper to let it accumulate in “hog lagoons” (open cesspools of hog feces and urine) that emit greenhouse gases like methane and can overflow in storms. When the lagoons fill up, as they inevitably do (the 9.5 million hogs in the state of North Carolina produce over 10 billion gallons of waste each year), then what?
In North Carolina, it’s legal to spray untreated hog waste into the air. The intention is to distribute the waste as fertilizer on farmland, but the stench doesn’t remain on the land (hence the “smell” in the title) and the liquid waste itself can also land far from its target. The result is that people living near hog farms suffer a number of negative effects, including increased disease incidence, while the corporation gets to keep its profits.
To take another example, hog barns have huge exhaust fans to get the deadly gases produced by hog waste away from the hogs so they don’t die. The problem is that the fans simply move the gases into air breathed by people who have nothing to do with the hog farm (yet another externality).
A number of lawsuits have been filed over the years against hog producers, despite the complication that individual hog farmers usually contractors to Smithfield or larger corporation, which dictates how they conduct operations but assumes no legal responsibility for problems caused by the resulting waste. Some of those suits have been successful, and some hog producers have found better ways to deal with the waste they create (like using it to create energy), but for many it’s business as usual. Meanwhile, the nearby residents continue to suffer from health issues, and some who speak up have suffered from retaliation.
The Smell of Money lays bare a specific example of the tangled mess of economic and racial privilege which explains so much about why things happen the way they do in the United States. It gives ample time to the direct experience of people negatively affected by hog farming but also includes voices like Senator Cory Booker and epidemiologist Steve Wing who place the issues in larger perspective. People from within the pork industry also get their say, as do state politicians, so a range of opinions are represented. As a result, the film can feel a bit scattered, but the throughline of Elsie Herring’s story, and subsequent lawsuit, help keep things on track.
The Smell of Money is screening in select theatres and available beginning Dec. 12 on VOD on all major services.
