農業情報研究所＞農業・農村・食料＞北米＞ニュース：2019年3月25日
トランプ移民政策は米国文化の自殺
Abattoir economics: Trump’s immigration
policy tests Iowa（FT.com,19.3.24
The state’s meat industry needs migrant labour at a time when government rhetoric is
hostile to outsiders
North-west Iowa is “the number one pork-producing district in all the United States of
America,” Steve King, its US congressman, boasted to constituents last week. A few days earlier, after meeting pork lobbyists, he posted a photo of himself smiling with a man dressed as a bacon rasher. Mr King is
better known for his hardline views on immigration.
The Republican has provoked outrage with statements such as “we can’t restore our
civilisation with somebody else’s babies” and “cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end------
He backs President Donald Trump’s border wall against illegal immigrants.
Being friendly to the state’s $36.7bn pork industry and hostile to immigrants is becoming an awkward position in Iowa, where 23m hogs massively outnumber 3m humans. With unemployment
at 2.4 per cent, the lowest in the nation, pork processors cannot find enough local people to cut up pigs. ------
Expansion in the US pork industry is running at record levels,
says Steve Meyer, an economist at Kerns and Associates. On March 4, the first hogs walked to the kill floor of a $325m plant that Prestage built outside Eagle Grove, Iowa. The aim is to slaughter 10,000 animals a
day once the first shift has its full complement of 920 people, says Jere Null, chief executive of Prestage’s Iowa foods division.
It is the second new pork plant in two years to open in Mr King’s sparsely settled
district of grain fields and ethanol refineries. In the old stockyards town of Sioux City, Iowa, Seaboard Triumph Foods’ $335m facility is still hundreds short of the 1,800 production workers it needs to reach
capacity of 20,400 pigs a day, executives say.
The labour squeeze will worsen as the US poultry industry
adds seven plants nationally in the next two years, according to Watt Global Media. To sell more $4.99 rotisserie chickens, the retailer Costco Wholesale is hiring 800 workers to dispatch 2m birds a week at a new
complex west of Iowa in Nebraska, says Jessica Kolterman of Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry division. Construction is on track despite catastrophic floods in the area last week. Asfaw Negash emigrated from Ethiopia
four years ago and found a job at a pork plant in Ottumwa, Iowa
The plants are a big bet on the US as the world’s low-cost supplier of
animal protein. American meat consumption will average 220.8lb per person in 2019, nearing a peak
reached 15 years ago, says Shayle Shagam, economist at the US department of agriculture. Demand for meat in developing countries is irrepressible: last year, US pork exports fell just 0.5 per cent despite
retaliatory tariffs in China and Mexico, while broiler chicken exports rose 4 per cent and beef exports shattered records.------
＜農業情報研究所関連情報＞
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