Seaboard Corporation

Seaboard Corporation

Type	Public
Traded as	AMEX: SEB
Industry	Agriculture and Shipping
Headquarters	Merriam, Kansas, United States
Subsidiaries	Seaboard Foods, Seaboard Marine, Seaboard Commodity Trading and Milling

Seaboard Corporation is a diversified conglomerate that operates worldwide a number of agriculture and ocean transport businesses. In the United States, the company mainly engages in pork production and processing. Internationally, Seaboard also has operations in cargo shipping, commodity merchandising, sugar and citrus production and flour milling. The company maintains a fleet of about 30 container vessels, 7 of which are company-owned, and approximately 23 chartered container vessels. The company also operates as an energy producer in the Dominican Republic generating electricity from diesel engines mounted on two large barges.

Seaboard has over 9500 employees, mostly in U.S., Latin America, and Africa. The company, based in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, is a Fortune 1000 firm with net sales exceeding $2.0 billion per year. Seaboard is a majority owned subsidiary of Seaboard Flour, which is owned by the Bresky family.^{[citation needed]}

Seaboard subsidiaries

• Seaboard Foods
• Seaboard Marine (Miami, Florida)
• Seaboard Commodity Trading and Milling
  • National Milling Company of Guyana, Guyana
• Other Divisions
  • Ingenio y Refineria San Martin del Tabacal SRL, Sugar and Citrus, Argentina
  • Transcontinental Capital Corp. (Bermuda) Ltd., Dominican Republic
  • Boyar Estates S.A., Bulgaria
  • Chestnut Hill Farms Honduras, S. de R.L. de C.V., Honduras
  • Mount Dora Farms Inc., Miami, Florida
  • Seaboard Transportation, Inc., Shawnee Mission, Kansas
  • Butterball LLC, Garner, North Carolina (50%)

Historical Controversies

In 1998, Pulitzer Prize investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele published a Time Magazine investigative article, "The Empire of the Pigs," which chronicled "how an extremely resourceful corporation plays the welfare game, maximizing the benefits to itself, often to the detriment of those who provide them." Barlett and Steele described a history of corporate welfare from 1990 to 1997 describing Seaboard Corporation as "the beneficiary of at least $150 million in economic incentives from federal, state and local governments to build and staff poultry- and hog-processing plants in the U.S.; insure its operations in foreign countries, and sell its products." Their research also alleged that Seaboard Corp. had a history of worker abuse and environmental damage during this same period as stock prices rose dramatically from $116 to $387 per share. Rick Hoffman, CEO of the company's Seaboard Farms subsidiary, responded by telling the Associated Press that, "There were no programs that Seaboard solicited by the state that did not already exist for other new businesses." He also declared that much of the money Time claimed was earmarked for Seaboard did not in fact benefit the company.

In 1996, Seaboard bought the sugar plantation and refinery, San Martin de Tabacal in Salta, Argentina, immediately firing 6,000 workers many of whom were members of the Ava Guaraní and Kolla indigenous communities. These indigenous communities have maintained an on-going claim to their ancestral lands which they have lived on and farmed for centuries. In 2003, they were violently removed at gunpoint re-invigorating a campaign to have Seaboard Corp./San Martin de Tabacal return their land. Their ongoing campaign quickly gained the support of Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and protests by international activists. In August, 2007 a judge ordered Seaboard to cease all tree and earth removal pending a court decision on land ownership.

External links

• Seaboard homepage
• Tabacal Agroindustria homepage