HEALTH: Factory Farms Migrate to Developing World

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

TORONTO, Oct 20 2005 (IPS) - Factory farms are becoming the dominant source of meat and egg production worldwide, creating environmental and social problems as well as conditions that promote diseases like avian flu and mad cow, researchers say.

Factory farms, or concentrated animal feeding operations, account for more than 74 percent of the world’s poultry and 68 percent of the eggs, said Danielle Nierenberg, a research association at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington.

About half of all pork and 43 percent of all beef in the world come from these industrial- scale farms.

“Growth of such operations is fastest near urban centres in Latin America, Asia and parts of Africa,” Nierenberg, who wrote the recent report “Happier Meals: Rethinking for the Global Meat Industry”, told IPS.

Opposition and tougher regulations concerning problems caused by factory farms with 100,000 pigs or a million chickens has driven many of these operations from North America and Europe, she said.

Waterways and soils polluted by manure, negative impacts on small farmers, inhumane conditions for animals, and other problems are now found in Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, and many other countries.

Disease issues are perhaps the latest concern, with avian flu currently capturing worldwide attention. Although measures to prevent avian flu include confining poultry indoors, Nierenberg and others believe that factory farming and markets where thousands of live birds are jammed together is responsible for the spread of the disease.

And there is evidence that mad cow disease and the Nipah virus outbreaks are linked to the spread of factory farming, she said.

There is less debate about the impact of such farms on local small-scale producers, who cannot compete with large, often international corporations. Farmers end up migrating to cities or working for the corporations.

“Poultry farmers in Mexico and Brazil end up as serfs on their own land, just like those in the U.S.,” said Nierenberg.

Around the world, small-scale farms are in decline as the U.S. and European model of industrial agriculture is being exported, said Mark Rosegrant, a director at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington.

Factory farming in the developing world has expanded enormously in the past 15 years and is already creating environmental problems, Rosegrant told IPS.

“With little enforcement of generally weak environmental laws, those problems are very likely to get much worse,” he said.

Meat consumption is rising quickly in the developing world, with China set to pass European per capita consumption in less than 20 years, he said. “That will require enormous increases in meat production.”

Countries will turn increasingly to intensive forms of production because they offer economies of scale, he said.

“That’s a really bad idea,” says Harriett Friedmann, an expert on the world food system at the University of Toronto.

“It’s a myth that factory farming is efficient,” Friedmann told IPS.

Factory farming is dependent on cheap fuel and fertiliser and large amounts of potable water. The enormous amounts of manure have to be dealt with, among other environmental impacts, and the costs end up being paid by the local people in one way or another, she said.

And most factory farms, no matter what country they are in, use the same two or three breeds of chickens or pigs, limiting the biodiversity of the food system and increasing its vulnerability to disease.

To prevent diseases in the crowded, unsanitary conditions, large amounts of antibiotics have to be given to the animals, setting the stage for the creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“How long before the real costs of factory farming start showing up? We’re in collective denial about this,” Friedmann said.

With a food production system that keeps producing more and more problems, a major crash is not far away, she said.

Not least amongst the problems of factory farms is the welfare of the animals themselves.

“Animal science has led us away from that belief or any such belief in the sanctity of animals. It has led us instead to the animal factory which, like the concentration camp, is a vision of Hell,” writes Wendell Berry, a U.S. farmer and essayist.

A recently released undercover video of a Canadian egg farm showed birds covered in excrement and stuffed into cages so small they can barely move. The farm is owned by a veterinarian with connections to Canada’s leading agricultural university.

“The photos and video explicitly revealed to me some extreme cruelty to layer hens… I am surprised to know such a state of affairs could exist in practice, especially in Canada,” said A.B.M. Raj, a senior research fellow at the School of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol.

“There is no reason to believe that conditions are any different on any other egg farm in Canada,” said Debra Probert of the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals.

Those conditions mirror cruelties repeatedly exposed in investigations of egg farms in the U.S., Probert said in a statement.

Such videos spur public demand for better conditions for farm animals in North America and Europe, but it is also another factor in the rapid rise in factory farms elsewhere, said Worldwatch Institute’s Nierenberg .

“Countries like China have animal welfare rules but there is no enforcement,” she said, adding that the worst thing about factory farming anywhere in the world is that it breaks the connection between farmers, the land and farm animals.