Why factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to
all life on the planet
Bibi van der Zee
Farming
It’s time the world woke up to the real impact of modern,
industrial farming, says Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon and the Deadzone
@bibivanderzee
Wed 4 Oct 2017 11.36 BST First published on Wed 4 Oct 2017
11.36 BST
The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial
farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, according to
the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups.
Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World
Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said:
“Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient,
wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a
total rethink of our food and farming systems before it’s too late.”
His comments came on the eve of Compassion’s Livestock and
Extinction conference in London which will bring together scientists,
campaigners, UN representatives and multinational food corporations including
Compass, Tesco and McDonalds. The conference aims to bring together a wide
ranges of voices and connect up the many impacts that factory farming has on
our planet.
The conference comes against a backdrop of alarming exposés
of industrial farming. A week ago a Guardian/ITV investigation showed chicken
factory staff in the UK changing crucial food safety information on chickens,
while a month ago the European commission admitted that eggs containing a
harmful pesticide may have been on sale in as many as 16 countries.
In the US in August, meanwhile, campaigners identified the
world’s largest ever “deadzone” – an area in the sea where pollutants from
farms create algal blooms that kill off or disperse marine life – and singled
out the US’s heavily industrialised factory farm system as a major cause.
In an interview with the Guardian, Lymbery said that when he
began campaigning on farm animals in 1990, it was still largely seen as a
cruelty issue rather than something that went far beyond that.
Since taking over as chief executive of CIWF in 2005,
Lymbery has focused on “moving the issue out of being a technical niche to get
people to understand industrial farming as a big, global problem”.
“We need to go beyond an isolated approach,” Lymbery says.
“Not just looking at the technical problems around welfare, not just looking at
the technical issues around the environment, not just looking at food security
in isolation, but putting all of these issues together, then we can see the
real problem that lies at the heart of our food system – industrial
agriculture.”
Lymbery argues that factory farming is not – as some contend
– an efficient, space-saving way to produce the world’s food but rather a
method in which the invisible costs are actually far higher than the savings.
“Factory farming is shrouded in mythology,” he said. “One of
the myths is that it’s an efficient way of producing food when actually it is
highly inefficient and wasteful.
“Another [myth] is
that the protagonists will say that it can be good for the welfare of the
animals. After all, if hens weren’t happy they wouldn’t lay eggs.
“The third myth is that factory farming saves space. On the
surface it looks plausible, because, by taking farm animals off the land and
cramming them into cages and confinement you are putting an awful lot of
animals into a small space. But what is overlooked in that equation is you are
then having to dedicate vast acreages of relatively scarce arable land to
growing the feed.
“The crops fed to industrially reared animals worldwide
could feed an extra four billion [people] on the planet.”
As the global demand for cheap meat grows, the expansion of
agricultural land is putting more and pressure on our forests, rivers and
oceans, contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, marine pollution zones and
the global biodiversity crisis, he said.
“The UN has warned that if we continue as we are, the
world’s soils will have effectively gone within 60 years. And then what? We
shouldn’t look to the sea to bail us out because commercial fisheries are
expected to be finished by 2048 …
“The rainforest homes
of the likes of jaguars and the critically endangered sumatran elephants are
being razed to make way for intensive crop production and plantations that are
feeding factory farm animals ... the mixed farm habitats of once common
farmland birds such as barn owls, turtle doves and skylarks are being stripped
away, and ... vast quantities of wild fish are being scooped up to feed
industrially reared farmed fish and chickens and pigs, leaving the likes of
penguins, puffins and other species starving.”
Antibiotic use is another red flag area. “There is now
overwhelming evidence that the routine prophylactic use of antibiotics is
leading to the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, and the World Health
Organisation has issued warnings that if we don’t do something to curb
antibiotic use in both human and animal medicine we will face a post-antibiotic
era where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.”
Although some countries, the UK and the US for example, are
now trying to cut back, antibiotic use is totally unregulated in other parts of
the world: in China the farmers can just prescribe and administer antibiotics
for themselves.
Lymbery believes that we already know the answer to this
problem. Compassion advocates a reduction in meat-eating (Lymbery himself is
vegan) but is not “anti-meat”. In the long term regenerative farming – a broad
term that includes all sorts of practices such as rotational grazing, tree
planting, improving soils, reducing chemical inputs, silvopasture and
increasing biodiversity – is, Lymbery believes, our only hope and a movement whose
time has come.
“Hilal Elver, the UN rapporteur for the right to food, has
talked about the need to move away from industrial agriculture towards
agro-ecological models. There is a groundswell – it’s almost starting to be a
zeitgeist as key thinkers in civil society start to join the dots and see that
actually we do need a new style of agriculture which goes beyond industrial
agriculture, which goes beyond simple sustainability, which brings us to a
point of regeneration.”
On the whole national governments have shown little interest
in radical farming reform. But there have been a few notable exceptions such as
India, Rwanda and Kenya, and the international community and the corporate
world is increasingly interested in financing and supporting these models
(USaid is funding a fantastic agroforestry project, although they may be hoping
that Trump doesn’t realise this). And in the last few months there has been
some support from surprising quarters, such as Michael Gove, the UK’s
environment secretary, and his recent statement that US-style industrial
farming will not be copied here. In the recent lead-up to the appointment of
the head of the WHO, more than 200 scientists and campaigners signed a letter
asking the appointee to promise to look at the “global health challenge” of
factory farming which was widely circulated on social media and led to an
editorial in the New York Times.
So how likely is it that we will get global action on food
and farming? “I am sure that 20 years ago people calling for a solution to
climate change were being asked exactly that question,” says Lymbery. “I
believe that nothing less will be needed if we are to secure the future for our
children.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário