Pig Business Director, Tracy Worcester, spoke at the ‘Brussels Spring Briefing’, a conference organised by the Parliament Magazine in partnership with the European Commission’s Representation in the UK on Tuesday 3rd May 2011 in Westminster. Her talk was part of the roundtable debate session entitled; ‘EU and the Countryside: Greener, fairer, better?’ Here is what she said:
Pig farmers in the EU have suffered a ‘winter of discontent’ with low supermarket prices for pork, high protein feed costs, a health scandal caused by animal feed contaminated with dioxin, and the recent discovery that flies are spreading antibiotic resistant bacteria from intensive farms to neighbouring urban areas.
The crisis underlines the vulnerability of the factory farming system which relies for its profitability on imported protein (soya) feed, polluting waste dispersal, direct and indirect subsidies, illegal treatment of animals and the reliance on antibiotics to keep the pigs alive
Destroys rainforest and contributes to green house gasses
Intensive farms rely on soya based pig feed, much of which is imported from South America where it is grown on cleared rainforest or ploughed-up Cerrados, a unique and diverse ecosystem which is being destroyed at the rate of 10,000 hectares every day to feed European livestock. The factory farming system’s reliance on shipping soya from countries 8,000 miles away makes it vulnerable to oil price hikes and to the volatility of the commodity market and is a huge contributor of Green house effect. In contrast, small independent farms usually grow their own cereal and protein on the farm, fertilise the fields with manure from the animals, do not pollute the air and water and rarely have to use antibiotics.
Impacts on human health
Pigs produce up to ten times as much faecal waste as humans so, with tens (often hundreds) of thousands of pigs in these sheds, there is a huge amount of waste emitting a cocktail of gasses (including ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, mixed with antibiotic resistant bacteria and organic particles) from the shed ventilation shafts, from the storage lagoon, and from the fields on which the solids are spread or the liquid sprayed.
About 25% of workers in US pig factories suffer permanent lung damage, usually through chronic asthma or bronchitis. Because the atomised sewage drifts downwind, neighbours of factory pig farms suffer running and burning eyes, sleeplessness, anxiety, respiratory and neurological diseases and depression.
The heavy use of antibiotics to prevent disease caused by early weaning of piglets and overcrowding is resulting in spread of antibiotic resistant diseases like e-coli, salmonella, campylobacter and the pig strain of MRSA.
Impacts on aquatic life
In many countries the untreated pig waste is sprayed onto fields which often become saturated. The waste, which on a small farm would be a valuable fertilizer, contaminates drinking water with nitrates and finds its way to lakes and the sea causing toxic algae blooms which kill enormous numbers of fish and marine organisms.
Destroys rural economies, food security and sovereignty
Large scale factory farms now have to compete with even bigger companies who aim to dominate a market by first capturing control of the slaughter capacity in a region. This vertical integration allows the industrial producer to control the whole process and to make its profit by selling finished meat products. This means it can pay very low prices to other pig breeders, who do not have slaughter capacity, and put them out of business.
Says Robert Kennedy Jr in the film, Pig Business, ‘the destruction of the small farm wasn’t casual it’s systematic. It is the intention, it is the way they make money, it’s the design of this industry.’
Subsidies in the EU
Small scale EU farmers along with farmers across the globe are facing competition from giant companies who, due to economies of scale are the prime beneficiaries from direct and indirect subsidies.
Direct subsidies are primarily in the form of export subsidies
Indirect subsidies include:
- Area payments to farmers for cereal crops for pig feed – the larger the farm area the larger the subsidy.
- Tariff free imports of Soya from South America
US Company Smithfield Foods Inc, the world’s biggest pork producer, was helped to move into Poland in the late 1990s by a taxpayer guaranteed loan of $25m from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that paved the way for further loans of $75m from private banks. As the Minister for Agriculture in Poland pointed out at the time,
It’s an unfair international competition- Polish farmers produce food of much higher quality… but they have huge difficulties in accessing easy, affordable credit to develop their farm… So nobody can say it’s a fair competition. I would call it a kind of distorted competition.
This EBRD loan allowed Smithfield to buy Animex, a former state slaughter house and processing operation. Although it was valued at $500 million thanks to a EU tax payer subsidised ‘modernisation’ upgrade, Smithfield bought it for $50 million. A deal that Joe Luter, former CEO of Smithfield, boasted to his shareholders cost them ‘10 cents in the dollar’.
Big industrial pig companies operate a centralised highly mechanised system of production, processing and distribution that also depends on indirect subsidies like wars to safeguard the uninterrupted supply of cheap oil, environment protection measures to clean up their waste, government investment in research technology and education, plus the transport infrastructure like super highways and bridges. All these benefits allow TN pig companies to comb the EU in search of good investment climates.
Good investment climates for agribusiness means countries with cheap currencies, low wages, compliant governments offering favourable tax incentives, lax environmental and animal welfare standards and poor standards at work.
Poland was one such country whose neo liberal government initially welcomed Smithfield Foods in order to compete with cheap imported pork from giant pig companies operating in EU15 countries. However, in 2003 a Polish government report showed that all 14 inspected Smithfield farms had violated environmental, construction, health and veterinary regulations. Smithfield’s low cost meat flooded the Polish market further bankrupting local small scale independent farmers. So, a new government in Poland tightened the regulations.
Smithfield response was to move part of its operations to Romania. Richard Poulson, CEO of Smithfield Foods said, “It has been an uphill fight in Poland and Romania is frankly a way for us to hedge our bets.”
Larry Pope, President and CEO of Smithfield Inc, explained the company’s strategy to develop low cost meat production in Eastern Europe and export into Western Europe. “……. we’ve got people in Western Europe who make 20 euro an hour when you’ve got people in Eastern Europe who make one and two euro an hour, you’ve got land in Western Europe, very hot place – land in Eastern Europe they will virtually give you. Plants in Western Europe are very expensive. Plants in Eastern Europe, they will virtually give to you for small dollars.”
Again Romania wanted to compete with the subsidized EU–15 pork flooding its market, so welcomed Smithfield.
Get big or get out is the motto in the EU as in the rest of the world.
In the UK, for example, in order to compete with cheap meat from giant producers operating in the EU market, a farmer’s cooperative is attempting to defy local opposition and persuade the council to give planning consent to build a 25,000 pig unit, by far the biggest in the UK.
CIWF found that most EU factory farms are operating below EU legal standards. Many authorities ignore the welfare directives so that their farmers can survive. Thus undermining the higher welfare standards often operated on small scale farms.
Dumping on third countries
Because pork production in the EU benefits from these subsidies, there is a huge EU surplus which is exported to third countries below the cost of production. This is unfair competition and has the effect of either eliminating local producers in the importing countries or forcing them to compete by lowering the rules on animal welfare, the environment, agricultural wages and social protection.
Solutions:
The Common Agriculture Policy should remove all direct and indirect subsidies to large scale pig production/processing and increase payments to small farmers to reward them for public benefits which are not remunerated in the farm gate prices such as conservation of biodiversity, sustainable land use and the survival of rural communities.
We are calling for the new cap to encourage farmers to grow their own protein feed to reduce their dependence on distant producers and protect biodiversity and soil fertility by the protein crops nitrogen fixing properties. This would free land in South America to feed local people and prevent the import of GM contaminated animal feed crops to the UK.
In answer to my question at the Oxford Farming Conference in 2007 David Cameron said, “Just as we don’t accept cars that aren’t meeting our emission standards so we shouldn’t accept food that doesn’t meet our welfare standards.”
Now that he’s in power, pressure from banks and agri-industry, has perhaps prevented our Prime Minister from putting his money where his mouth is and challenging their free trade mantra.
Countries, in the EU, must be able to protect their farmers from low welfare and low cost products with tariff barriers. Food exported to a region below the cost of production is ‘dumping’, as it puts the importing country’s farmers out of business.
- Calls for the CAP post 2013 to provide increased support for farmers who move towards sustainable forms of pig husbandry respecting animal welfare and using local feed.
- Calls for reforming a pork sector presently heavily dependent on imported protein feed and on exports of structural pork surpluses by introducing supply management of EU pork production, and regulating the market. This would include a ban of any form of export subsidy and an introduction of tariffs for imports of pork from third countries at prices below the EU average cost of production.
- Calls on the EU to favours small and middle size farms with better distribution of farms among the regions and to adapt safety standards for small processing units to sell in their local market.
- Calls on the EU to bring to an end the preventative use of antibiotics in pig farming.
- Calls for improved enforcement of Council Directive on pig welfare 2008/120/EC that requires the provision of enrichment materials and prohibits routine tail docking.
[...] Pig Business Director speaks at ‘Brussels Spring Briefing’, Westminster [...]
The essentials that were metioned in this article are important, to youngsters and grown-ups equally.