As COVID-19 Spreads, Full-Page Ads Appeal to Consumers: ‘Eat as if Everyone’s Life Depends on It, Because It Does’
For Immediate Release:
May 14, 2020
Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382
Norfolk, Va. – Swine flu, bird flu, SARS, and now COVID-19 have all been linked to confining animals for consumption—but that point is often missed in conversations about preventing future pandemics. To put animals on the table, in the right way, PETA has hit TheWashington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other major dailies with full-page ads that urge people to think about the filth and cruelty inside factory farms and slaughterhouses—and consider being part of the solution by going vegan. Copies of the ads are available here.
“No one needs meat,” the ads underscore. “Eat as if everyone’s life depends on it, because it does.”
“From swine flu to SARS to COVID-19, it’s as clear as the gloved hand in front of your masked face that eating animals is killing us,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s ads directly tell the public that it’s about more than social distancing and hand sanitizer—it’s about what, or who, we’re putting on our plates.”
The Hill, the Washington Examiner, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Seattle Times also ran PETA’s ads, and others are pending approval. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune rejected a version that ran in the Los Angeles Times. Other papers that rejected PETA’s ads include the Toronto Star, the National Review, and the New York Post.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
A view of the chicken and meat section at a grocery store, April 28, 2020 Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — U.S. meat exports are surging even as the industry is struggling to meet domestic demand because of coronavirus outbreaks at processing plants that have sickened hundreds of workers and caused companies to scramble to improve conditions.
Although the situation could cause concern that American workers are risking their health to meet foreign demand, experts say it shouldn’t because much of the meat sold to other countries is cuts that Americans generally don’t eat. And at least one of the four major processors says it has reduced exports during the pandemic.
If companies manage to keep their workers healthy and plants operating, there should be plenty of supply to satisfy domestic and foreign markets, according to industry officials.
FILE – Wilson Castro wears a mask and gloves as he restocks the shelves in the meat department at the Presidente Supermarket on April 13, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“I really feel like the industry is well positioned to serve all of its customers both here and abroad,” said Joe Schuele, a spokesman for the industry trade group U.S. Meat Export Federation.
Meat exports, particularly pork exports to China, grew significantly throughout the first three months of the year. This was partly due to several new trade agreements that were completed before the coronavirus outbreak led to the temporary closure of dozens of U.S. meatpacking plants in April and May and to increased absenteeism at many plants that reduced their output.
The Meat Export Federation said pork exports jumped 40% and beef exports grew 9% during the first three months of the year. Chicken exports, meanwhile, grew by 8% in the first quarter. Complete figures weren’t yet available for April, but Agriculture Department figures for the last week of April show that pork exports jumped by 40% as shipments to China and Japan surged and exports to Mexico and Canada remained strong. Beef exports declined by 22% in that last week of April.
China’s demand for imported pork has risen over the past year because its own pig herds were decimated by an outbreak of African swine fever, and China pledged to buy $40 billion in U.S. agricultural products per year under a trade pact signed in January. China also became the fourth-largest market for American poultry in the first quarter after it lifted a five-year ban on those products. A trade agreement with Japan and a new North American free trade agreement also helped boost exports.
FILE – Butcher Sebastian Soria cuts beef for customers at butcher’s shop La Tiernita of Villa Puyrredon area on March 25, 2020 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Photo by Amilcar Orfali/Getty Images)
Part of the reason why exports have continued to be so strong this spring is that much of the meat headed overseas was bought up to six months ahead of time — before the virus outbreak took hold in the U.S.
“A lot of these sales were made before COVID-19 hit. China had already made these purchases and then COVID-19 hit. They had actually pre-purchased a lot of this before the plant problems hit,” said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.
It’s also worth noting that meat exports to China and other Asian markets include cuts such as pig feet, snouts and internal organs that have little value in the United States. The most popular cuts in the U.S., including bacon and pork chops, largely stay in the domestic market. More than half of the chicken exports to China were chicken feet. And the Meat Export Federation says demand from the export market helps boost meat production in the U.S. because more animals are slaughtered to help meet all the demand.
Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig said he doesn’t think it makes sense to restrict exports because so much of the meat sold internationally isn’t popular in the U.S.
“I think it’s important to prioritize,” said Naig, whose state leads the nation in pork production. “I think companies should meet the domestic market first and then be free to sell the things that the American consumer doesn’t purchase and the types of things that we don’t normally consume. That’s economically important.”
Workers line up to enter the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Ind., Thursday, May 7, 2020. In Cass County, home to the Tyson plant, confirmed coronavirus cases have surpassed 1,500. That’s given the county — home to about 38,000 residents — one of the nation’s highest per-capita infection rates. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Meat production in the United States is dominated by a few huge companies — JBS, Smithfield, Tyson Foods and Cargill. Cameron Bruett, a spokesman for JBS, said that Brazilian-owned company has reduced exports to help ensure it can satisfy U.S. demand for its products. Tyson Foods and Cargill didn’t respond to questions about their exports.
The Greeley JBS meat packing plant sits idle on April 16, 2020 in Greeley, Colorado. The meat packing facility has voluntarily closed until April 24 in order to test employees for the coronavirus (COVID-19) virus. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
Smithfield Foods, which is owned by a Chinese company, said in a statement that it isn’t controlled by any government and that the free market determines what products it exports. JBS declined to respond to questions about its foreign ownership. Purdue University agricultural economist Jayson Lusk said it’s not clear what role the foreign owners play in deciding how much meat is exported.
The industry has been dealing with a number of production challenges caused by the coronavirus, and several large plants had to close temporarily because of outbreaks of COVID-19, the disease it causes. At least 30 U.S. meatpacking workers have died of COVID-19 and another 10,000 have been infected or exposed to the virus, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents roughly 80% of the country’s beef and pork workers and 33% of its poultry workers.
Kansas State agricultural economist Glynn Tonsor said he thinks the industry will get past the shortage concerns within the next several weeks.
“I think it’s important that we note that the U.S. hog industry is large enough to sufficiently supply our domestic market and export. We’ve done that for some time. We’ve been growing volumes in both places for some time,” Tonsor said.
Tyson and Smithfield have both been able to reopen huge pork processing plants that were temporarily closed in Iowa and South Dakota, which should help the industry keep up with demand even if some plants aren’t running at full capacity, said David Herring, of the National Pork Producers Council.
“I really don’t think we’ll see a big problem with meat shortages,” said Herring, who raises hogs near Lillington, North Carolina. “As long as the plants are able to come back up and operate maybe not at 100% but at 80% or 90%, I think we should be good.”
A Tyson Foods pork processing plant, temporarily closed due to an outbreak of the coronavirus, in Waterloo, Iowa, April 29, 2020. (Brenna Norman/Reuters)
It’s not always clear whether industry representatives regret the waste of life or just a waste of food.NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEUnfolding this month, in the background of the pandemic, is a “depopulation” of livestock farms — another surreal new term of the crisis to add to our list. It’s as detached and colorless a word as the industry could find for gassing, suffocating, or otherwise doing in the millions of animals whose appointments at the abattoir have been canceled by coronavirus outbreaks and who therefore, in the refrain of news coverage, have “nowhere to go.”
The system has its own unbending schedules and logic. No sheltering in place for factory-farmed pigs, cows, chickens, and other creatures when yet more troubles appear. When they can’t die on a kill line, because a slaughterhouse has closed, that just means they have to die somewhere else to get out of the way — even if, as in this case, they’re all bound for landfills, blast furnaces, or burial pits.
Culling is a grim necessity, we’re told, and industry representatives have been straining to convey a sense of loss, though it’s not always clear whether they regret the waste of life or just a waste of food. In an emergency conference call on the logistics of the cull, recorded online by pork producers, one speaker captured the feeling: “It’s a topic that makes us all sick to our stomachs.”
Among techniques discussed in that call, and left for farmers to apply according to cost and “depopulation efficiency,” were gunshot and electrocution (“preferred” methods), “manual blunt force trauma” (beating animals to death with blows to the head, also “preferred”), ventilation shutdown and poisoning by carbon monoxide or sodium nitrate (these approaches “permitted in constrained circumstances”). When the pork producers’ lead veterinarian turned to the details of setting up a “gas chamber,” you could understand how disoriented a rational person would feel.
By presidential directive, the meat industry is now to be considered an “essential” enterprise. This intervention will safeguard such assets as our “national pork reserve,” while reopening the slaughter plants and leaving the companies in their accustomed position of taking no responsibility for the consequences. Culling continues anyway, because with the merest pause the meat system convulses with “backlog,” requiring travails for which producers expect our sympathy.
So sorrowful is the task that Iowa’s governor and U.S. senators have requested federal support not only in “depopulation” itself but also in helping to cope with the emotional aftermath: “Providing mental health assistance to farmers, veterinarians and others involved in the difficult decisions and processes around euthanizing and disposing of animals is imperative.” The National Pork Producers Council, in various statements pleading for public understanding along with the federal cash payouts, likewise speaks of “tragic choices,” “gut-wrenching decisions,” and “devastating last resorts” — all pointing to euthanasia as “the most humane option.”
A grievous situation, from any angle. And it would be nice to think that, even in some fleeting moment of revelation, these people who run our factory farms and slaughterhouses had awakened to the reality that living creatures are never just commodities, that they warrant our moral concern, and their suffering, our compassion. More likely, in these expressions of disquiet, we have a massive case of compartmentalizing, in which the mind selectively acknowledges one kind of problem while failing to grasp others of equal moral gravity.
What is so “gut-wrenching” about culling, compared with practices that these same people accept as a matter of course, in unconstrained circumstances and in disregard of every consideration except their own convenience and profit? With the turn of a switch, and in a matter of minutes, half a million chickens may be gassed or suffocated in a single facility, only because industrial agriculture packs these afflicted fowl of the air into vast warehouses, the laying hens crammed into row after row of small and filthy cages. A depressing possibility, given that such miseries are the design of the same farmers doing the culling, is that all they really lament is the loss of time and money. And even that feeling passes quickly, as culling is turned to advantage, with higher prices following the short-term constriction in supply.
If “mass depopulation” makes for a sickening sight, even to factory farmers, then you would think that “mass confinement” of animals would long ago have had a similar effect. Under “intensive confinement,” another term of the trade, these culled animals have known a world of only concrete and metal, with all the privations, mutilations, and other cruelties that are the industry’s first resort, and with even the veterinarians hired only to refine the punishments. Indeed, every modern hog farm is a training ground in culling, as the weak and near-dead are routinely dragged to “cull pens,” while the others are kept alive, amid pathogenic disease and squalor, only by a reckless use of antibiotics. The externalized cost to public health being left, as always with factory farming, for others to deal with.
Such is the culling expertise of America’s pork producers that when China’s current swine-fever contagion began to spread, factory farmers in that country knew who to call. Our industry’s best minds in the field were dispatched to the scene, where even now millions of pigs are being gassed or buried alive.
Where was the industry’s concern for “humane options” when this regulatory change was advocated? Where was that alertness to “tragic choices” when it might have done some good? And does it give anyone a moment’s pause that pigs, slaughtered at a national rate of half a million a day, are highly intelligent and social creatures, at least as smart and sensitive as any dog facing the similar horrors of a Wuhan wet market?
The chairman of Tyson Foods last week, in an unctuous and self-pitying letter typical of the industry’s public pronouncements, expressed confidence that his company’s “core values” would see it through the crisis. Yet for years, that company and others have sought laws to prohibit anyone from taking pictures inside their facilities, lest we learn more about how things work in what industry executives prefer to call “protein production.” What are the core values of people in a massive enterprise that depends so heavily on concealment and euphemism?
How jarring to hear them now supplicating for “mental-health assistance” to soothe their emotional wounds, as if they felt some attachment to animals they have done nothing but abuse, employing methods they are afraid to let us see. And how absurd to find Tyson’s top man solemnly declaring that “the food supply chain is breaking” (meat, he informs us, is “as essential as healthcare”), as though we’re just one or two slaughterhouse shutdowns away from famine. Happily, the crop growers of America — the farmers who truly sustain our country, and who don’t need gas chambers when things go wrong — have got us covered.
Sometimes the failures in a system reveal the essence of the whole. Abnormal circumstances can clarify problems that pass for normal. Doubtless, in their “depopulation” measures, the livestock farmers themselves feel they have “nowhere to go,” forced by their own manias of consolidation and hyper-efficiency to make one harsh choice after another, all the conscientious alternatives long ago ruled out. Yet if somehow it troubles them, in their culling labors, to treat millions of living creatures as nothing — bulldozed away, like so much piled-up trash — then now’s a good moment, for all of us, to notice that the system is just as merciless when it is working to perfection.
Every one of those creatures, like billions of others, was marked for a bitter, frightened, pain-filled life anyway — and to what good end? It is all in service to a business whose ruthlessness to animals, utter indifference to workers, destructiveness to the environment, and manifold harm to human health combine to qualify it as perhaps the least essential industry in America, and among the most amoral.
By all means, give them their mental-health assistance. Add some ethics counseling, too. And just make certain that the treatment includes serious, intensive introspection.
THEY BELONGTO THE FOREST Commonly known as “matsing” or “unggoy,” long-tailed macaques are a subspecies of the crab-eating macaques and are endemic to Philippine forests. —PHOTO FROM CRUELTY FREE INTERNATIONAL
MANILA, Philippines — Animal rights advocates have urged the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to refuse any permits seeking to trap wild long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis philippensis) in Romblon province for research and export purposes amid the reported population boom of these monkeys on the island.
The call came after reports that the DENR would consider applications for permits to capture the primates for breeding farms, which supply animals for laboratory experiments and testing.
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Trapping wild primates is cruel and taking them from their habitats and social groups can cause immense suffering in animals, said the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) and Action for Primates.
“One of the reasons given by the DENR for considering an application for the capture of the wild monkeys is conflict arising between people and the monkeys,” the groups said in a joint statement on Monday.
“Conflict issues, however, are usually due to human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of the natural habitat, forcing primates to compete with people over land and resources,” they added.
Endemic, near-threatened
Commonly known as “matsing” or “unggoy,” long-tailed macaques are a subspecies of the crab-eating macaques and are endemic to Philippine forests.
They were classified as near-threatened in the most recent assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2008.
In an interview, Henry Adornado, DENR director of Mimaropa region, confirmed the rising number of macaques in Romblon but said the agency had yet to estimate their total population.
Among the reasons for their increasing numbers are the absence of natural predators, such as the Philippine Eagle, and people leaving them alone in the wild.
Relocation, education
With their growing numbers, the monkeys pose a threat to banana and coconut plantation of communities, Adornado said.
But Nedim Buyukmihci, an animal rights activist and representative of Action for Primates, said there were human approaches to population control to resolve conflicts without resorting to the capture and removal of wild macaques from their natural habitats.
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These include reproduction control, relocation and educating communities so that monkeys would not be encouraged to rely on humans for food.
Protected area proposed
“At a time when there is increasing awareness of the devastating consequences that human activity is having on the natural world, including nonhuman primates, it is imperative that we learn to coexist with other species rather than just eliminate them when conflicts arise,” said Buyukmihci.
Instead of seeing these animals as nuisance, a protected area for macaques should be established in Romblon, said PAWS executive director Anna Cabrera.
“We can set things right by taking immediate steps to establish a protected area for macaques and to develop eco-friendly systems within human communities to allow them to live in harmony with wildlife,” she said.
Ricardo Calderon, director of the Biodiversity Management Bureau, said his office had yet to receive any applications for the capture and breeding of macaques in Romblon.
“Any application for permit will have to undergo site assessment and evaluation as part of the due diligence being required under existing rules and regulation,” Calderon told the Inquirer.
Breeding
Breeding of wildlife for commercial purposes is allowed under the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act through the issuance of a wildlife farm-culture permit. Only offspring of those bred in captivity may be traded and exported.
Earlier reports cited the Philippines as among the world’s major exporters of laboratory monkeys. In 2015, however, macaque exports were suspended after an Ebola Reston virus killed 11 monkeys. This particular strain was nonfatal to humans.
In the late 1990s, these exports were similarly halted after a monkey shipped from a primate farm in Laguna province died in Texas, also of the Ebola virus. At least 49 other primates had to be put to death due to the virus. INQ
More than 700 employees at a Tyson Foods meat factory in Perry, Iowa, have tested positive for coronavirus as the nation braces for a possible meat shortage due to the pandemic.
Tyson Foods said in a statement that the pandemic has forced the company to slow production and close plants in Dakota City, Nebraska, and Pasco, Washington, and the Perry plant as well.
“We have and expect to continue to face slowdowns and temporary idling of production facilities from team member shortages or choices we make to ensure operational safety,” the statement said.
John Tyson, board chairman of Tyson Foods, warned that the food-supply chain is breaking in a full-page advertisement published last month in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Tyson Foods is not the only meat company facing worker infections. A Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, closed in April after two workers died and 783 others tested positive for the virus.
The pandemic’s impact on meat plant workers has caused serious concerns about the supply chain in the U.S. and fears that the country could experience a meat shortage.
“We have had some difficulty where they are having a liability where it’s really unfair to them,” Trump said at a small-business event at the White House last week. “I fully understand that it’s not their fault.”
Joe Biden, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, said Monday that he feared for those meatpacking workers. He said that such plants, along with nursing homes, have become “the most dangerous places there are right now.”
“They designate them as essential workers and then treat them as disposable,” Biden said of the meatpackers.
Covid-19 is a zoonotic virus, meaning it spread to humans from animals. Scientists aren’t sure which animal spread it to us, though they think snakes or bats might have via pangolins. But it’s not just exotic, wild animals that spread diseases. New research shows the next global public health crisis could come to us through industrial animal agriculture.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, shows that contemporary farming methods—including the overuse of antibiotics, high numbers of animals crammed into small spaces, and a lack of genetic diversity—make it more likely that pathogens will spread to people from farm animals and create an epidemic for humans.
“Our work shows that environmental change and increased contact with farm animals has caused bacterial infections to cross over to humans, too,” Sam Sheppard, a professor at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath and author of the study, said in a statement.
In particular, the scientists analyzed the evolution of the bacteria Campylobacter jejuni, which is commonly found in farm animals’ crap and according to the World Health Organization is the leading bacterial cause of human gastroenteritis, aka the stomach flu. The researchers studied the genetic evolution of the bacteria and found that strains specific to cattle emerged in the 20th century—around the same time that humans started farming cattle in huge numbers.
“Campylobacter are excreted by cattle into the environment every day,” the authors wrote. “The sheer magnitude of shedding is clearly important in terms of direct environmental contamination and potential spillover into the human food chain.”
The scientists argue that the changes in cattle diet, anatomy, and physiology which resulted from industrial agriculture enabled the bacteria to mutate and become able to infect humans. That includes common practices today like feeding cows vitamin supplements to keep them healthy and make them bulkier.
Chickens, pigs, and wild animals can all spread the Campylobacter jejuni, but the biggest issue is cattle. Researchers found the bacteria in their feces a fifth of the time (gross, I know, sorry).
“There are an estimated 1.5 billion cattle on Earth, each producing around 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of manure each day,” said Sheppard. “If roughly 20 percent of these are carrying Campylobacter, that amounts to a huge potential public health risk.”
If the bug does get transmitted to people, it’s hard to treat. Since so many antibiotics are used in animal agriculture, the bacteria is resistant to those medicines. The researchers hope the world will examine its relationship with agriculture and make changes to prevent the spread of the bug.
“I think this is a wake-up call to be more responsible about farming methods, so we can reduce the risk of outbreaks of problematic pathogens in the future,” Sheppard said.
The changes this research demands are clear: We should stop rearing so many damn animals for meat. Since animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution globally, we should probably be doing that anyway.
New York (CNN Business)Tyson warned Monday that it expects more meat plant closures this year.
The company also said it will continue producing less meat than usual, as workers refrain from coming to work during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have and expect to continue to face slowdowns and temporary idling of production facilities from team member shortages or choices we make to ensure operational safety,” the company said in a statement discussing financial results from the first three months of this year.
“We will not hesitate to idle any plant for deep cleaning when the need arises,” CEO Noel White added during an analyst call Monday.
“There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” Board chairman John Tyson warned in a full-page ad that appeared recently in newspapers across the country.
In a statement responding to the directive, Smithfield lauded the decision but noted that it is “evaluating next steps to open its currently shuttered facilities and will make announcements when it is ready to resume operations in each location.”
The day after the president signed the order, JBS USA announced it would partially reopen its pork production facility in Worthington, Minnesota — but only to euthanize hogs that won’t be processed because of bottlenecks in the supply chain.
“While our focus is on getting the Worthington facility back to work on behalf of our team members producing food for the nation, we believe we have a responsibility to step up when our producer partners are in need,” Bob Krebs, President of JBS USA Pork, said in a statement. “None of us want to euthanize hogs, but our producers are facing a terrible, unprecedented situation.”
The National Pork Producers Council also praised the order but acknowledged that hogs will still go to waste.
“While getting pork packing plants back online is foundational, the tragic reality is that millions of hogs can’t enter the food supply,” the council said in a statement, adding “we need coordinated partnership between the industry and federal, state and local authorities to euthanize pigs.”
The pandemic has halved the amount of pork processing capacity in the country, according to the company.
The challenge for Tyson: While meat processing plants have ground to a stop, consumer demand for meat is up.
Tyson (TSN) reported selling 2.7% more more beef by volume in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2019. Pork sales popped 2% by volume, while chicken sales fell 1.5%, partially because of restaurant closures due to the pandemic.
Overall, retail sales are up about 30% to 40%, White estimated. In food service, he added, sales have fallen about 25% to 30%
Headlines at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic pointed to “wet markets” in China as the source of the outbreak. But while attention turned abroad, an equally sinister disease incubator was here at home: factory farms.
Factory farms create conditions similar to wet markets
The conditions in China’s wholesale wet markets are very similar to those in US factory farms, which, as the name implies, are essentially animal factories. These facilities cram thousands of animals into tightly packed spaces, causing the animals elevated stress, which lowers their immune levels. In the warehouse-like structures animals receive little, if any, of the heathy benefits of sun light and fresh air.
We raise animals for food on a modern day assembly line, in conditions that make them prime targets for the incubation and spread of disease. And when one animal in a factory farm gets sick, the pathogen can rapidly spread — killing hundreds or thousands of animals and potentially jumping to humans. That process is called “zoonotic,” and it’s widely cited as the mechanism behind COVID-19.
Factory farms also have launched viral pandemics
This isn’t a “what if” scenario. It’s happened before — several pandemics have been incubated in factory farms.
In the late 1990s, the H1N1 flu virus originated in factory farms in North Carolina. A mutated form of this North Carolina virus later popped up in a factory farm in Mexico where it spread around the world, leading to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. During its first year of circulation, the 2009 H1N1 flu killed between 151,700 – 575,400 people worldwide.
In 2006, an outbreak of bird flu turned into a full-scale pandemic after originating in factory farms in China. In early April, as the coronavirus was raging, a South Carolina poultry factory farm operation was forced to cull tens of thousands of birds after discovering an outbreak of bird flu. While thankfully contained to themeat packing single farm, this outbreak could have had equally dire consequences.
Those are just two of many examples. The fact that the previous outbreaks did not force us into home isolation was only a stroke of dumb luck.
The factory farm industry is acutely aware that it is playing with fire. Antibiotics, meant for the treatment of bacterial infections, are routinely used on factory farms to prevent the spread of disease. In fact, 70 percent of the total volume of medically important antibiotics in the US are sold for animal agriculture.
The overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic resistance. Infections that were once curable develop a resistance to the drugs used to treat them. The rise of drug-resistant superbugs, such as MRSA, puts our collective public health at risk. Resistant infections could have dire consequences for future pandemics, especially those that have bacterial complications like pneumonia.
Our public health and ability to treat diseases should not be sold for corporate gain.
COVID-19 shows the need for family farms, but factory farms have pushed them out of business
The current coronavirus pandemic is demonstrating how fragile our highly consolidated food system is and how ill-equipped it is to handle emergency situations. Every day more and more meat-packing plants become ground zero for new outbreaks of coronavirus, and thousands of people are putting their lives on the line, literally, to keep these facilities functioning.
Even as long lines are forming at food banks, produce is being plowed under and meat is piling up in cold storage. Corporate agriculture has created this broken system, which constantly puts us at risk of another pandemic. But corporate agriculture has shown that it is wholly unable to meet our needs during a pandemic.
Runoff from this Maryland livestock yard may enter a nearby stream and degrade nearby water quality.
Where are our public institutions in this time of crisis? Our food system is being held hostage by a few corporations that control everything — from piglets to politicians. With this power, the factory farm industry has mercilessly lobbied against measures that would keep us and our food safe.
Demanding faster line speeds at meatpacking plants and unnecessarily increasing risks for slaughterhouse workers, opposing restrictions on antibiotic use, and even refusing to provide workers with necessary protective equipment — these are just a few examples of how Big Ag puts profits before the lives of consumers.
The Farm System Reform Act would greatly reduce the risk of zoonotic pandemics
This crisis has illustrated just how broken our food system truly is. People are angry that wet markets are already reopening, but we cannot ignore that the way we raise animals in the U.S. places us at risk for future pandemics. As the COVID-19 outbreak forces us to significantly alter our daily lives and to lose our financial security, will we finally muster the political will to overhaul our food system to decrease the likelihood of the next pandemic? Our lives depend on it.
Exposing the Big Game 