Analyze

This image hides many things, including:

1. the slow but steady dispossession of smallholder (often African-American) farms that have been overtaken/bought out by Smithfield Foods to enlarge the industrial footprint of CAFOs;

2. the hogs themselves, whose hooves never touch the ground as they stand on "hog slats" inside the hangers as they move through the Fordist stages of transformation from individual animals into packaged pork;

3. the human operators, themselves, who are rarely wealthy, and are contracted for decades (or life) to purchase all "inputs" (feed, semen, etc) from Smithfield; in 2010, I took my EJ class from UNC-Chapel Hill to visit one of these operators at his CAFO, outside Raleigh, NC, and he was battling Smithfield and Duke Energy to be allowed to erect and operate a small-scale, experimental wind turbine that ran on methane captured from his pigs; years later, individual efforts at small-scale biogas would be overtaken by entities like Align LNG which now, in Sampson County, proposes the "Grady Road Project" to scale-up factory-farmed methane gas capture from much larger operations;

4. the legacy of resistance to this form of agricultural production, led by community-based intellectuals like Gary Grant, who as early as the 1980s was speaking out, traveling to state and federal lawmakers, publishing, and organizing against the growing harms of CAFOs in his home territory of Halifax County, NC. [See the suggested readings by Gary Grant and Steve Wing, Naeema Muhammed and others, that tracks this organized resistance and the formation of several community-based EJ groups in response].

As outlined in this brief article by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, energy consumption by New York City alone has dropped significantly more than the surrounding areas. On a prima-facie observation, one could say the foregoing alleviates stress on the existing energy infrastructures. However, deeper analyses should consider the repercussions that demanding less energy may have on production, supply, and distribution, as well as transitions between larger and smaller electric microgrids. Given energy infrastructures in the United States are already vulnerable, can it be really said the pandemic alleviates stress on the existing energy infrastructures when everybody is connected to the internet and is generally using more technology at home?

The gift of the money caused discord in the community - rather than buying the good tea for a better price, so that it feels earned, it is a bigger power dynamic to gift the money

The publication of standards, inspections, certification, decertification, branding - connection to policy for organic certification

I don’t think they particularly see themselves as helpful to the tea growers - they are  more about codifying/enacting a “final vocabulary” around their view of environmental sustainability

In the context of a supply chain where the Global North [sic] corp/buyer is at the top, they are defining and enacting “the ethical” and environmental “responsibility” in their standards and their inspections and their certifications and labels and branding, without any real awareness of how these things are already happening, for different reasons, in the context of somewhere like Tanzania where the tea is actually being grown.

Standards development organizations, which include heavy influence from corporations in the Global North [sic], are “codify[ing] values of sustainability that are to govern practices” p825

Not much on the context of CSR or the history of these SDOs and why they exist.