Network Consequences Due to Oligopolists and Oligopsonists in the Hog Industry, Pollution from Hog Production, and the Failure to Regulate Ecological Criteria
Humans have been in a symbiotic relationship with hogs since the time humans became a species. That relationship evolved into a set of transactional (as defined by instrumentalists) processes beginning with the hunter-gatherer tribes. The network of relationships has continued to become more numerous, intense, and complex. Hogs have served in social systems with humans as societal symbols for prowess for numerous groups (with wild boars, for example, on coats of arms in Europe), as religious symbols (both positive and negative), as a source of human disease in the hog-chicken-human cycle for generating flu in Asia, and, more recently, as a source of organs to be transplanted into humans. We usually think of the hog as a proven converter of waste material and low-cost crops into human food and leather. That use of hogs-which has become an inefficient system-is the area of concern here. This analysis is based on the transactional network of institutional economics, as outlined in figure 1. The purpose is threefold. The first is to review the model of the relationship between the oligopsonistic corporations which slaughter hogs and the farmer-feeder hog producer. The second is to further develop the normative theoretical connection between ecological systems and social institutions (NE in figure 1). Most analysis in ecological economics has concentrated on the impact of socioeconomic institutions on the ecological system. The analysis here emphasizes the delivery of ecological criteria (NE) to institutional organizations from the ecology. Glen Atkinson has emphasized the importance of investigations of real world problems for improving the theoretical base of the institutionalist paradigm (2003, 5). That is a purpose here with regard to