Farmageddon

28 April 2009

The initial response to the swine flu outbreak has been to treat the symptoms, not the cause – closing the sty door after the pig has bolted, as it were, writes Stephen Gardner. The Roche pharmaceuticals company will be looking forward to big profits because – as with the 2005 bird flu outbreaks – demand for their tamiflu antiviral drug will go through the roof. But attention should swiftly turn to the cause. United States environmental news site Grist has highlighted how industrial farming of pigs could be at the root of it, in particular intensive farming units in the south of Mexico. Here pigs are packed together in stressful conditions. Stress equals lower resistance to disease, and holding large numbers of animals in small spaces means viruses can spread like wildfire. Grist suggests swine flu is "a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses," effectively mixed up in the disease incubator that is a factory farm. In the long run, rather than spending billions on stockpiling tamiflu, it would surely be better to change farming practices so outbreaks are prevented in the first place. And there is another pressing reason why this needs to be done: the imperative of finding ways to tackle climate change. One way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, in principle, is to turn away from intensive livestock rearing and eat less meat. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made this point last year, saying that people should have an increasing number of meat-free days. He was backed up by different studies and estimates, including from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, which calculated that meat production generates 20 percent of global greenhouse gases, in particular methane. Pachauri's comments led to a predictable backlash from the farming industry. His words were also trivialised by the press, even by so-called serious newspapers (The Observer headlined its article 'Is our taste for Sunday roast killing the planet? That tasty piece of top rump resting on your dining table is the source of many of the world's environmental woes'). Pachauri was also misrepresented. It was reported that he was calling on the planet to turn vegetarian, when in fact he said that people should try to eat less meat, not cut it out altogether. But Pachauri highlighted a serious problem. Farming, and in particular the modern industrialised version, has a massive environmental cost. Both the backlash against Pachauri's comments, and the treat-the-symptoms-not-the-cause response to swine flu show that there is a resistance to assessing the full extent of this and addressing it. Other outbreaks and incidences, such as foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, or the 2007 bird flu manifestation on Bernard Matthews turkey farms (also in the UK), show that the standard response is to wipe out the affected animals and pump anyone who contracts the virus full of drugs... and then when the fuss has died down to hose down the factory farm sheds and get back to business as usual. Is there any serious political will to do anything about this, to place more stringent conditions on factory farming, for example? There may be some pressure coming from the bottom upwards, with supermarket customers and green campaigners calling for more ethically produced food, but from the top down, little action is being taken. Increasingly in any case, these questions are for the developing world, where meat consumption is rising (Chinese per capita annual meat consumption nearly tripled between 1980 and 2007), and where consumer squeamishness about how meat is produced is largely absent. Countries such as China are also huge markets for industrial farmers in the rich world, who have rationalised their operations to such a degree that they can supply large volumes of meat at low prices. Farmers have a huge financial incentive to meet rising demand, meaning vested interests have a huge incentive to resist change. Pachauri's words of caution notwithstanding, these trends, and political inertia, mean that the environmental risks of intensive farming are likely to intensify. For news and analysis relating to European Union environmental policy, contact Stephen Gardner.

 

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