There will be a class of eco-conscious pork consumers shunning COFCO to buy local, free range, hormone free, non-CAFO, all good, humanely slaughtered pork.  We just have to wait a while...

See, look how much eco-consciousness has done for our Chesapeake Bay...imagine that goodness spreading to China while you're eating your pork BBQ sandwiches.

The current food system is a shaky monoculture monorail, propped up on cheap fertilizer, cheap oil, and people in debt. Any country is only 3 meals from a revolution, including the grand old United States.

Got local food?

i am curious if this will be the positive thing it sounds like. hope so. please keep us posted Tom!

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I think this is the scariest bad news I've seen yet. I really don't think Walmart will suddenly change its ways. It's just trying to increase its customer base. They just don't seem to understand that most people who understand the importance of buying local also know better than to shop at Walmart!

Smithfield attempt to increase its market share by setting up production in China has little chance of working. China does not grow enough grain to feed its people today and has to import grain to meet the current needs. Hogs consume 7 pounds of corn for every pound of meat produced. Corn this week was selling for $7.45 a bushel (56 lbs) double what it was a couple years ago. The increased competition for corn and other grains in a growing population and a shrinking production base is going to continue to increase the price of pork and in developed countries like the USA meat consumption will continue to decline as people shift their food dollars to cheaper food. I do not see developing countries, which have even fewer dollars for food, being able to buy increasingly higher priced pork.

The more likely scenario is that overall meat and dairy production will continue to decline in the western world and will grow very little in the developing world. The increased competition for food calories in the "free" market will change the allocation of grain uses and the inefficient production of meat will suffer the market forces. In other words we won't be eating meat at every meal. This has already started in the Mid-West. Many small farmers have discontinued feeding cattle and hogs and are getting more money for their corn by selling the grain instead of feeding livestock. It is all about money. The consumer can only spend so much for meat. I would start selling my stocks in fast food hamburger places and meat packers.What the doctors have been unable to do, balancing the American diet the Market is going to accomplish. Welcome to the brave new balanced diet World.

Farming organically in Ohio.

Peak oil and climate destabilization will.

As much as we need to understand the global dynamics of food, Wal-Mart, Tyson, Smithfield et al., I am concerned that we don't spend nearly as much time--or enough time--working on actually building on-the-ground successful operating local food systems in our home communities.  Local ought to mean locally-owned as well as locally grown.  CSAs work.  Farmers' markets work.  Locally-owned, locally sourced small scale retail also can work.

Hank

Isn't it at least encouraging that we have the room, the option to improve our infrastructure and the way we handle food rather than just starve? If corporations as big as Wal-Mart are even thinking of buying local produce, which helps to reduce fuel consumption, air pollution, global warming, you name it- for the nation and the whole world- then it is definitely possible to return to our centuries-old ways of eating food logically, not shipping the same foodstuffs around the world and back again. Yay for high fuel prices! It hurts to get better.