“This industry is a criminal enterprise, it cannot produce a pound of bacon cheaper or more efficiently than a traditional farmer in a free economy without breaking the law.”
Both concerned MEPS and EU NGOs and their counterparts in the US, agree that subsidies and loan guarantees to factory farms should be scrapped and that small family farmers should be paid for the benefits they provide to rural communities and the environment.
Though the ban on sow stalls during pregnancy is to be partially banned in the EU in 2013, the US still allows them to be confined in steel cages so narrow that they cannot turn around. Some years ago Smithfield promised to ban sow stalls after a 10 year ‘adjustment’ period, but they have now reneged on this saying it would reduce their profit margin.
After the US screening I am now back in Brussels
working on Janusz Wojciechowski’s suggestion that we invite a few sympathetic MEPs and many NGOs to join us in compiling a declaration on the need for The Common Agricultural Policy to stop financing industrial farming, spend more on supporting traditional small and medium scale mixed crop and livestock farming along with laws to introduce method-of-production labelling.
Smithfield’s exploitation of cheap labour and lax environmental standards in Poland gave it the competitive edge so many EU farmers must either get big and externalise their costs on to the broader community or get out of pig farming. North Carolina, USA
In an extraordinary move, lawyers for a factory pig producer in the UK threatened to sue the organic certifying organisation,
The Soil Association, for libel unless they withdrew their objections that a planned 2,500-sow factory farm would pose a risk to neighbours’ health because antibiotic resistant bacteria would escape from the barns and lorries transporting the pigs.
Sick pig in Smithfield
Foods factory farm in Wieckowice, Poland
There are numerous scientific reports which support the Soil Association’s concerns. In many people’s minds, the libel threat confirmed
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that corporate meat producers will use any methods they can to advance their business, in this case trying to use Britain’s outmoded libel laws to suppress public debate by preventing criticism of factory farming and subverting the planning process.
Largely I am against giving powers to the EU Parliament and Commission to dictate rules on member nations. However, following the American model of allowing family farmers to be bankrupted by unfairly subsidised competition, when our DEFRA Minister, Caroline Spelman, argues that, Common Agricultural Policy support for farmers should be phased out, I am relieved that her free trade agenda will be over-ruled by the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Dacian Ciolos.
His proposals are to limit subsidies to industrial size farms and increase payments to smaller scale farmers. The latter’s competitiveness is reduced by their obligation to adhere to higher EU hygiene standards that have been introduced to curb the inevitable problems on large scale intensive farms. These payments would also reimburse them for providing public benefits such as conservation of landscapes and biodiversity, which are not remunerated by the market.
Tracy Worcester with pigs at Hilary Chester-Master‘s Abbey Farm, Cirencester
However, I prefer an option supported by 350 groups across the EU in a coalition called FoodSovCAP. I believe that food and agricultural goods should be exempted from World Trade Organisation (WTO) global trade rules so that all nations and regions have the right to protect themselves from low cost, low welfare imports. Or that the WTO recognises that food imported to a region below the cost of production is ‘dumping’ and so must have punitive tariffs.
Farmers could then be protected from the vagaries of the global economy and produce food for local markets. The giants should be taxed to remunerate society for the true costs of their production and Governments should be allowed to procure high welfare and sustainably produced meat from local farmers for public services like schools and hospitals.
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