IN ARKANSAS, THE GAME IS CHICKEN
Don Tyson kills 25 million chickens a week on his assembly lines, 10 times as many birds as there are people in Arkansas. The annual revenue of his firm, Tyson Foods, the largest in the state's dominant industry, is twice the size of the Arkansas budget. Those figures alone help explain a key equation in the state that Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton has governed for 11 years: Chickens equal political power.
Nowhere is that connection more evident than here in the rolling hills of northwest Arkansas, where Tyson is president of a $4 billion family business that is the world's leading chicken processing company.
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It would be an overstatement to say that Clinton and Tyson could not have succeeded without each other -- for the most part their relationship has been of mutual benefit, helping Tyson expand his operations and Clinton ascend politically.
But critics of Clinton say the relationship has had serious costs for the state he governs, both to its environment and to the middle-class taxpayers who live with an inequitable tax system that gives breaks to industry while imposing sales taxes on such necessities as food.
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One of Clinton's most telling encounters with the ecological dangers of poultry waste involved a Tyson Foods processing plant in Green Forest, a hamlet 65 miles from here near the Missouri border.
The problem originated years before Clinton first became governor in 1979 when the plant discharged such heavy volumes of waste into the town's treatment facility that it overflowed, allowing raw sewage to enter Dry Creek, which serves as a drainage ditch for the facility.
The state pollution control agency knew of the creek's fragile state -- its limestone floor was prone to sink. But after Green Forest officials made some improvements in sewage treatment, the agency re-licensed the facility in 1977 on condition that the town reach an agreement with Tyson to partially treat its wastes.
By the time Clinton entered office, Green Forest already was proving unable to handle Tyson's sewage load. The chicken plant accounted for 90 percent of the town's waste in the late 1970s and was growing rapidly. As the treatment facility became overloaded, town officials borrowed Tyson's equipment to siphon off sludge and dump it on local fields, according to a lawsuit filed by residents.
But despite the known risks of a sinkhole opening in Dry Creek, state officials did not enforce the original 1977 permit requirement that Tyson pre-treat waste before sending it to the Green Forest facility. No fines were issued, no legal action was taken to shut down the Tyson plant or the treatment facility and no pleas for federal help were made by Arkansas authorities.
The worst fears came true in May 1983, shortly after Clinton was elected governor for the second time. A sinkhole developed in Dry Creek, and through it partially treated sewage from the Tyson plant drained into the ground water at the rate of 1 million gallons a day.
Many residents of the low-income farming town drew their water from household wells and developed chronic dysentery. Steve Work, who owns a gift shop outside Green Forest, was told by a doctor that his symptoms resembled salmonella, a bacteria that can be transmitted by poultry. Work also noticed globs of grease in his drinking water. But he did not connect his illness to the ground water until an aquifer on a neighbor's property turned septic a year later, killing hundreds of fish in the once pristine spring.
"The buzzards were camped right below the stream. We went down to investigate and it smelled like sewage," he recalled recently. "If those fish hadn't died, I believe I would have."
A 'Disaster Emergency'
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