Listen to Ralph Nader's March 3 speech in San Francisco.
Environmental groups wage legal campaign to stop pollution.
By Ralph Nader A concentrated food industry and concentrated factory farms have combined to throw rural America into one of the worst crises it has ever faced. Federal and state regulators have failed to curtail the merger frenzy among livestock firms, or the surge in factory farms that are polluting water supplies and poisoning ecosystems. Now comes hope that the judicial system may offer some relief, at least from the worst excesses of the factory farm system. The top five hog-processing companies, Smithfield, IBP, Excel, Monfort, and Farmland, jointly control approximately 63 percent of the market. Accompanying the horizontal integration has been a vertical integration that has choked the open market for cattle and hogs.