Tuesday, May 05, 2009
The inside of the National Pork Producers Council office in Washington, DC, resembled a war room last week as pork lobbyists almost pulled their hair out trying to contain the political and, most importantly, culinary fallout from “swine flu” hysteria. As news reports flooded the airwaves of the growing epidemic, the lobbyists tried to find ways of dispelling rumors and questionable assertions that threatened to taboo the “other white meat.”
The stakes were enormous, for not only were the lobbyists worried about Americans turning away from eating pork, but also billions of people worldwide. “Pork is the meat of choice around the world,” lobbyist Kirk Ferrell told the Washington Post from the council’s “policy triage” center. “Forty-four percent of people globally eat pork.”
The lobbyists had to convince domestic and foreign markets that the U.S. pork industry was “still open for business,” which was far easier said than done. First, Egypt panicked and slaughtered all 300,000 pigs in its country, and then Russia and China started rumbling about banning pork imports from Iowa once reports surfaced of locals falling ill with the virus. Meanwhile, hog prices were still dropping.
The nonstop effort to spin the story away from destroying pig farmers produced results late last week when the Obama administration publicly declared a new name for the illness: H1N1 flu. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa and longtime friend of the pork industry, even stood on the White House lawn and reassured Americans that pork was still safe to eat. So safe, said Vilsack, that he himself had eaten pork for breakfast and lunch that day.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The Pork Lobbyists, Ready to Reassure (by Phillip Rucker, Washington Post)
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