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Few days ago, we expressed our displeasure for the decision of our government to diversify the agricultural industry by directly investing $15 million into the building of two huge hog barns costing a total of $60 million. Rightly so, Murray Mandryk, journalist with the Leader Post, has stated that our government was not capable of attracting private capital in the hog industry even though it has been relaxing pollution and labour standards in this sector of the economy. We also expressed the concern that the diversification into the hog industry was being focused only on one company, Big Sky Farms Inc.

Today, I read in the Ottawa Citizen that a Taiwanese company is proposing to build a $40 million hog farm operation near Foremost, Alberta, after it encountered environmental concerns in its previous planning to build a similar hog operation in Taiwan. More than 700 of 1,100 residents have signed a petition to oppose the proposal. Lisa Bechthold, a resident of Foremost, claims that the amount of manure the hogs will produce is equivalent to the amount of sewage a city of 240,000 produces each year. She says that "there's got to be something better than making us into a dumping ground.... We don't want to become an E. coli outbreak waiting to happen."

So, this is the way the Government diversifies its agricultural economy: after killing rural Saskatchewan it is now the time for turning it into a dumping ground for the few and privileged.

References

Specific reference: Alberta residents fear environmental crisis if Taiwanese firm's $40-million bid approved, Douglas Quan, July 23, 2000, The Ottawa Citizen

General reference: Articles by Mario deSantis published by Ensign http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/authors/desantisNG.html