Search

Local organizers harmed by global corporations can find solidarity and resources among other impacted localities. Formosa Plastics Group (FPG), a transnational petrochemical conglomerate from Taiwan, has caused environmental disasters and subsequent opposition movements in Vietnam, the U.S., and in their home country. Crossing physical and cultural borders, activists from these communities are using their shared knowledge and power to demand retribution. The International Monitor Formosa Alliance, or IMFA, represents the coordination of global anti-FPG activists to address localized issues. On October 31st, for example, activists converged in front of a FPG facility in Point Comfort, Texas to lead a Global Hunger Strike against the company's actions in Vietnam. Bringing together various networks and knowledges, the strike calls for justice years after the Ha Tinh Steel Plant in Vietnam released toxic pollutants, causing mass fish death in 2016. Diane Wilson, strike leader and Goldman Environmental Prize winner, has coordinated with Nancy Bui, leader of Justice for Formosa’s Victims, and other global activists to demand compensation for Vietnamese victims and release of imprisoned protestors. Their collaboration can serve as a model for other communities opposing global industry. 

Image source: Zoe Friese. 

Pictured: Activists (left to right) Nancy Bui, DIane Wilson and Sharon Lavigne with enviromental lawyer (far right) Marco Simons speaking at a confressional briefing about the 2016 Ha Tihn Steel Plant incident hosted by the IMFA.

Friese, Zoe. 2023. "The International Monitor Formosa Alliance: Addressing Local Issues with Global Alliances." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11. 

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].