Pork, ham, loin: name your corpse, it’s dead pig. And in Chile, more than half of it comes from AgroSuper, whose world’s biggest pork plant is now in the news. The pitch for these big industrial agricultural facilities is always that they’ll keep consumer prices down. Let’s see how that’s going, looking at prices in Santiago, according to the government’s Agricultural Studies and Policy Office.
All prices are in Chilean pesos. To get a sense of what these prices mean, minimum wage has climbed from 159,000 pesos a month to 182,000 pesos a month during this period. Let’s assume that people work 22 days a month. Take the most extreme case, that of costillar at the supermarket. A worker could get it for 3,000 pesos at the end of 2008, or 2.4 kilos for a day’s basic wages. This year, it’s averaging 5,000 pesos a kilo, or 1.65 kilos for a day’s work. That’s a big change.
Extra bonus charts: more lines that go up and to the right, from this roadshow.
Agrosuper debt burden
Agrosuper profit and net margin
Hmm, maybe there is some other motivation behind these big industrial farms.
Setty's notebook 
¿Qué podemos decir? ¡Es una cochinada! I remember some German books for the general public where they would add information about the evolution of purchasing power for a worker across the time: how many hours they had to work for a kilogram of butter, of meat, for a cinema ticket, for a bike, etc…those charts can be so neat. It would be so nice if our Latin American newspapers could produce these sort of charts, they would be eye-poppers. But for them one needs to do some homework, like you do.
They could produce a film like Fakin (Head-on, Gegen die Wand) is doing on a Turkish disaster
Has there been some decent footage on the pig disaster in Chile? Like in Chilevisión? Wee joke, wee joke.
I would like tot your readers know that the slurry waste from these huge Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) can be processed in real time without lagoons and digesters. The slurry can be piped away and captured directly into large conical turbine centrifuges that spin at high RPM resulting in 98% of the solids recovered and it resembles semi dry coffee grounds and the smell reduced because without water the solids do not smell. We now have a high quality component that can be gassified with heat and converted into bio-syngas diesel.
We process the still contaminated liquid through sea water desal membranes which extracts 75% of the water as high quality water back to the animals for drinking and this water is bioligically safe for reuse and discharge back into the environment. see: http://www.agwastesolutions.com and my patented technology at: http://www.vortecwater.com
Robert Bosko PE, Phone: 1-604-866-4193 or 1-604-864-4195
ro_bosko@msn.com
Congrats, this is the first commercial message I’ve let through into the comments here. I know nothing about your machines or about you, but I appreciate that you’re thinking about these things.