I am not a lobbyist, and I am not in industrial farming. I am a mom, and I lead an organization of mothers. So, when I tell you that one of the most consequential fights in this year’s Farm Bill could devastate American families, I want you to know exactly where I’m standing.
Lawmakers drafting the Farm Bill are being pressured to slip in a provision most people have never heard of and would never support if they had. It is called the “Save Our Bacon” Act. Behind the cutesy name is the industrial pork lobby, and the biggest beneficiary of this provision is a company most families don’t realize is foreign owned.
Smithfield Foods is the country’s largest pork producer, controlling roughly a quarter of U.S. pork. It is also owned by Chinese conglomerate WH Group, which bought Smithfield in 2013 in what remains the largest Chinese acquisition of an American business. The “Save Our Bacon” Act would strip voters of the power to set our own food and farming standards and hand a major advantage to China.
Having lost at the ballot box and in the courts, the China-backed industrial pork lobby is now running a well-funded campaign to smuggle the Save Our Bacon Act into the Farm Bill.
It’s worth asking why a Chinese company is working this hard to take power away from voters. Clearly, this was never really about a bigger profit margin. The 2013 takeover was financed by the state-owned Bank of China, which in its own annual report cast the loan as part of the government’s plan to help Chinese firms buy up businesses abroad.
China treats its food supply as a matter of national security, so it has every reason to want our laws bent toward its interests. But how food is raised on American soil is not a small thing for our country. It is a matter of our health, our safety, and in the end, whether the public still governs itself.
For now, we still do. The laws China hopes to wipe away did not come from bureaucrats. They came from voters. Californians passed Proposition 12 with 63% of the vote. Massachusetts passed Question 3 with 78%. Both laws require that pork sold in those states comes from farms meeting minimum space standards for mother pigs, rather than those that confine animals in small, unsanitary cages.
The pork industry sued to overturn Prop 12 and lost at the Supreme Court, which upheld the law. The Save Our Bacon Act would erase those votes with a stroke of a pen and bar states from ever passing anything like them again.
Congress doing China’s bidding to override a two-thirds and three-quarters majority of a state’s voters should trouble anyone who believes in American liberty.
But the Save Our Bacon Act is most troubling to those who care about family farmers. Thousands of producers took those voters at their word: they borrowed money and retrofitted their barns to meet the higher standards. Higher standards that these farmers can meet that China’s Smithfield Foods falls short. With family farmers vanishing across the country, these laws provide a rare foothold against foreign titans.
The number of U.S. farms raising hogs has fallen more than 70% since 1990 as production consolidated into a handful of giants, with Smithfield as the largest among them. Standards such as Prop 12 gave survivors a premium market where an independent producer can outcompete an industrial operation. The Save Our Bacon Act would make those investments worthless overnight, reward the operations that resisted progress, and cut off one of the last lifelines these family farmers have left.
Here is why mothers should pay attention. These state laws are not only about animals, though the cruelty is real and worth naming: a mother pig kept in a metal crate so small she cannot turn around for most of her life. The laws are also a firewall for our families’ health. Many of the standards this bill would wipe out provide critical defenses against outbreaks like avian flu and the screwworm now threatening U.S. herds. Crowded, unsanitary confinement raises the risk of contaminated food and of toxic runoff in rural communities.
In China, WH Group’s home country, this model has been pushed to its extreme, with high-rise hog “skyscrapers” that stack pigs floor upon floor. That is the future the Save Our Bacon Act invites onto American soil.
KEEPING PIGS IN CRATES WON’T MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY
I don’t want my family eating food raised that way. And I don’t want Washington, acting on China’s behalf, telling my state it has no right to demand better. This is not conservative or liberal. It is common sense, and it is the kind of thing mothers across all 50 states can agree on.
Legislators of both parties should say plainly that they oppose any Farm Bill if it contains the Save Our Bacon Act, or any slightly watered-down version of it. Save our bacon? This bill sells it to China.
Kimberly Fletcher is the president and founder of Moms for America.