When we think about “coastal communities,” we tend to imagine those on the water. However, it is worth adopting a wider view of “the coast.” Social processes, such as displacement driven by coastal development, and environmental processes, such as climate change, that affect communities on the water, also frequently affect other nearby communities. North Carolina’s coastal plain is not an exception to this, and is, in many ways, a place of environmental risk. A warming climate means low lying coastal areas are at more frequent risk of tropical storms. The Cape Fear River, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean near Wilmington, NC, has received national attention for the high level of “forever chemicals” found in its waters. And for decades, communities have expressed concern about the large number of Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) that dot the state’s rural coastal plain. CAFOs, in particular, highlight a complicated web of risk that weaves together climate threat, negative public health outcomes, and structures of racial capitalism.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there were 8.2 million head of hogs and pigs in North Carolina on December 1, 2022. This ranks North Carolina as the third largest pork producer in the country, trailing only Iowa and Minnesota. The USDA also reported more than 976 million head of chickens and broilers (i.e., chickens raised for slaughter) in 2022. Put differently, pork and poultry are big business in North Carolina, generating $721 million in pork exports and $372 million in broiler meat exports in 2017, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Concentrated on North Carolina’s southeastern coastal plain, the farms on which these animals are raised are not the traditional family farms that many of us imagine. Starting in the 1980s, North Carolina’s pork industry expanded dramatically, and small farms were replaced with efficient industrial swine operations owned by corporations like Smithfield Foods (now a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate WH Group). Similarly, poultry production has boomed in recent years, especially in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties, where the estimated chicken and turkey population grew from 83 million in 2012 to 113 million in 2019, according to Waterkeeper Alliance. Termed “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), it may be more appropriate to think of these “farms” as factories, as each house hundreds or thousands of animals in confined and crowded spaces.
Not only do CAFOs raise ethical concerns about the treatment of animals, they also pose significant environmental and human health risks that disproportionately burden communities with higher rates of racial minority and low-income residents. CAFOs produce animal waste on a scale so large that it cannot be safely metabolized back into the environment. Management of this waste by way of hog lagoons and poultry litter piles poses risks for local water quality. Especially during heavy rain events or when hog lagoons leak, runoff from CAFOs can pollute local waterways and ground water supply, exposing local residents to high levels of E. coli and causing toxic algal blooms. Of significant note, here, is that CAFOs continue to be built on the low lying coastal plain, and climate change has meant the region experiences tropical storms, some of which quite severe, more frequently. Hurricanes Florence and Matthew, for example, caused many hog lagoons to overflow. Furthermore, people living and working in close proximity to hog houses and spray fields (areas where animal sewage is liquified and sprayed above a field, in an attempt to dispose of the waste) report experiences with noxious odors, depression, and respiratory and pulmonary disorders.
It is important that CAFOs be recognized as a case of environmental injustice, whereby low income and racially minoritized communities bear the environmental burdens of extractive industrial projects. Put differently, the cost of cheap pork and poultry products is the health of marginalized communities. It is also important to grapple with the inequity of the governance systems that actively work to disempower local communities. Despite the fact that these risks have been the subject of environmental justice concern and protest for decades, regulation and oversight of the pork and poultry industries by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) remains “shockingly lax,” and the newly proposed Animal Feeding Operations General Permit allows for greater flexibility in their already dangerous management of animal waste, including greater allowances for spraying and volume of sewage buildup in hog lagoons, thus increasing the risk of pollution and public health risks and entrenching the problem of factory farms more deeply.