The other concern I have with this unregulated industrial meat production is the extent to which antibiotics are required to enable the survival to slaughter of the animals.  It is not an issue for this latest virus, in so far as I know, but these conditions could also be brewing the next virulent multiply drug resistant bacteria.  Should one of these bacterial strains also acquire human-to-human airborne transmissibility it could pose serious pandemic potential.

We are now in the process of empirically quantifying the "external" costs of NAFTA.  "Who could have imagined" that these external costs would not have been confined to areas outside the "first world?"  Or perhaps the truth is that an external cost of NAFTA is turning out to be the destruction of any distinction between "first world" countries and "second or third world" countries.  And not just for health issues.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Please note that one week into the epidemic, not a single major American newspaper has reported even the possibility that factory farming may be implicated in swine flu.  The power of the meat industry could not be more graphically underlined.  (In President Obama’s most recent news conference, he even used an esoteric medical name for the virus to avoid mentioning the connection with pigs.)

There is also another political link. When the Stimulus Bill (”Recovery Act”) came to the floor of Congress, it included appropriations of almost  a billion dollars to prepare for a possible flu pandemic. But Karl Rove organized Republicans to demand that this money be taken out of the bill, and when Senator Susan M. Collins of Maine agreed to vote down a filibuster against the bill, one of her demands was that the pandemic appropriation be stripped out. It was.

Somehow the notion that health is more than a private personal concern, that it involves the whole community and indeed the whole planet, has escaped the attention of some who call themselves “conservatives.”

There is a reason that we  speak of people “hogging ” everything for themselves, or eating “piggishly.” It is about ignoring the needs of others and seeking to gobble up the world’s abundance for the benefit of a few. That kind of greed is at the root of the impoverishment of the middle class, the bonuses of hundreds of millions of dollars for a small group of bankers, the willingness of Big Oil and Big Coal to burn the world for their own profit, and the willingness of the last U.S. government to lie, torture, and kill for the sake of controlling great pools of oil.

[...]

Almost a year ago, when the Postville debacle showed the destructiveness of present immigration policy, The Shalom Center also pointed out that the oppressive behavior of the Rubashkin owners toward both workers and animals was based on the effort to make super-profits out of factory farming.  The torture of animals and the oppression of workers followed as a matter of course.

footnote

"Followed as a matter of course" seemed like such a strong echo of my own train of thought

I don’t see the two themes (torture and CAFO) as at all separate really. One may be a distraction from the other in the media circus but both are stories about the brutality of the quest for profit and control. No amount of suffering (and CAFOs are nothing if not giant torture-houses for animals as well as workers) is too much for the elite to inflict in their quest for profit and control. The cruelty of capitalism was always there, from the Enclosures and evictions to the Conquista to the “dark satanic mills” and the brutal mistreatment of labour, and it continues wherever profit and “efficiency” in profiteering are the ultimate goals.

I have not worked out this train of thought very thoroughly yet, but it seems to me justabout axiomatic that the notion of industrial efficiency (with its emphasis on conformity, control, repeatability, regimentation, maximisation of throughput, and prioritisation of the mechanical over the biotic) -- when applied to living systems (critters) -- will always result in suffering and cruelty, illness and misery.  And it seems to me also axiomatic that the singleminded pursuit of money-profit maximisation, even without industrialism, always guarantees cruelty and suffering (to get the maximum possible work out of your slaves with the minimum cost in food and care, you have to abuse them as living creatures, let alone as human beings).  The synergy of industrial efficiency and singleminded profit maximisation -- applied to critters -- finds its canonical expression in the CAFO (it well represents the rest of our deeply, disturbingly sick corporate agricultural system): as Reb Arthur said, torture and oppression follow as a matter of course.

A nation that quietly condones the mass torture of animals for the expediencies of profit, it seems to me, is fairly well-prepared for the torture of humans for the expediencies of politics (and profit, too).

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

I think most of us here would agree with the following:
Forcing animals to live in inhumane conditions is unethical.
The overuse/preventative use of anti-biotics in animals to compensate for the unsanitary conditions they are forced to live in is dangerous.
NAFTA and the mechanisms of globalization allow corporations to take advantage of countries where labor and safety standards are low for the benefit of countries where many many people enjoy high standards of labor and safety, promoting inequality.
The panic among the media and the public is disproportional to the actual probability of deathly illness from H1N1.

For me personally, it is a significant leap of rationality from these assessments to the conspiracy theory advanced in this diary.  I think we need some historical perspective.  Pandemics are neither new nor made-up media phenomena.  But they have been used by people to advance their own sketchy belief systems.  And to remember that correlation does not prove causation.  The idea that the media hype is some attempt to distract us from the issue of factory farming and NAFTA is something I don't buy.  I think the media hype is more about ratings, people - including journalists - not understanding, fear of the unknown, and authorities who would rather be safe than sorry.  

No doubt the conditions of factory farming create a petri dish for bacteria and viruses.  But so do hospitals and school cafeterias.  I have a feeling vegetarians are trying to use H1N1 the way a Christian Scientists would use MRSA to say "I told ya so."  I feel conflicted saying this because I don't support inhumane factory farming.  


"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms." -Dostoevsky

Earlier reports, also in the Guardian.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

'Sapere aude'

Johann Hari on the real price of "cheap" meat

It's kind of ironic that the devaluation of antibiotics (via their promiscuous use in factory ag) may be more dangerous than the acclerated development of new viruses...  a flu pandemic with effective antibiotics for the opportunistic bacterial infections isn't all that scary except for the most frail of immune systems.  Without effective antibiotics, kind of a different story (as in 1918, yes?  strep was the proximate cause of death, the flu just opened the door for strep).  But it's all part of the same sorry-ass picture of cruel greed (or greedy cruelty) and reckless disregard for the commonwealth (as in Common-weal, as in well-being).

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

...Veratect Corporation, a two-year-old U.S. company that monitors disease outbreaks worldwide, claims it identified the first case of the new virus on Mar. 30 in the municipality of Perote, in the southeastern Mexican state of Veracruz, 800 km from the Mexican capital.

The Seattle, Washington-based company says it reported the cases to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCs) and the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) in early April.

A pig factory farm run by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Smithfield Foods - the world's largest pork producer and processor - operates near the Perote village of La Gloria.

Mexico's health ministry confirmed Wednesday that the first case in Mexico of swine flu - which is a new mix of pig, bird, and human viruses - occurred in Perote, although the first person to die of the disease in this country was an employee of a national tax office on Apr. 12 in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Researchers and activists point to intensive pig farming as a perfect breeding-ground for new viruses.

Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher with the Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), says the roots of the current epidemic lie in the pig farming industry dominated by transnational corporations.

The industry rejects such allegations. Alejandro Ramírez, assistant director of the Confederation of Mexican Hog Farmers, denied that pigs were the cause of the epidemic.

He also said that although pork does not transmit the virus, consumption of pork in Mexico has fallen 80 percent. Annual per capita consumption of pork in this country is approximately 13 kgs.

"This is a critical situation, and we are seeking solutions," he told IPS. "We need to decide what to do with the meat that is not being sold."

After a Jun. 30, 2007 inspection of Granjas Carroll, the federal environmental protection agency, PROFEPA, reported that the company - the largest pork producer in the country - had committed irregularities in waste disposal that posed a threat to the soil, air, water and underground water sources.

PROFEPA set a Jun. 30, 2009 deadline for the factory farm to bring its operations up to the country's environmental standards, in order to obtain the environment ministry's "clean industry certificate."

Some 6,000 pork producers with 14 million hogs produce more than one million tons a month of pork in Mexico.

Hog farmers in Mexico and the United States pressed for the name of the disease to be changed.

On Thursday, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agency would stop using the term "swine flu," in order to prevent confusion over the danger posed by pigs. Instead, he said, it would "stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A."

In a preliminary analysis of the new virus, researchers found that it arose from North American swine flu strains first identified in 1998 at a hog factory farm in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where a similar new human-pig hybrid virus had killed hundreds of animals.

In a report based on a 2.5 year investigation, which was released in April 2008, the U.S.-based Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production concluded that industrialised animal agriculture posed "unacceptable" public health risks, as well as threats to the environment.

"Due to the large numbers of animals housed in close quarters in typical (industrial farm animal production) facilities, there are many opportunities for animals to be infected by several strains of pathogens, leading to increased chance for a strain to emerge that can infect and spread in humans," warns the report "Putting Meat on The Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America".

The independent commission, whose 15 members came from the fields of veterinary medicine, agriculture, public health, business, government, rural advocacy and animal welfare, was set up in 2005 to study the impacts of the drastic changes in animal agriculture in the United States over the past 40 years.

The report emphasised the danger that "the continual cycling of viruses...in large herds or flocks (will) increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human-to-human transmission."

The Sleezers’ boars live in the first barn I had passed on the way in. It’s located three miles from the other barn, which contains only sows, in order to reduce the risk of the wind blowing pathogens between the two herds. A chain-link fence, topped with razor wire, keeps away people and animals, which are also potential disease vectors. Nothing meant for human consumption comes out of the building; it produces only semen, delivered to a nearby lab via an underground pneumatic tube. The tube carries the fluid in containers that look very much like those at drive-through bank-teller windows.

In the old days, a prize boar might provide natural service to sows on all the local farms. Today, this would be economic suicide for large producers and a literal death sentence for the pigs. The modern pig is so susceptible to disease that producers must take extreme measures to transform their barns into pathogen-free bubbles. The pigs are vulnerable because they live in close quarters; and because they are genetically uniform, a bug that breaches the defenses of one pig’s immune system can hop to the next. A bacterium stowing away between a traveling boar’s toes could wipe out half a herd. Producers expose their hogs to fewer germs when they bring only the semen from outside rather than the whole boar.

Sleezer’s protective measures are not limited to fencing and pneumatic tubes; he keeps new boars in quarantine for sixty days and tests their blood three times before moving them in with the rest of the herd. The Sleezers run the farm as a family, but to avoid transporting germs, only Derrick ever enters the boar barn. The swine also receive a small amount of antibiotics in their feed, which helps them fend off sickness. It’s a controversial practice because pathogens will eventually evolve resistance to the drugs. But almost all modern farms use low-level anti biotics in feed: besides blocking diseases, antibiotics boost animal growth rates.

Other operations often maintain even more stringent measures than the Sleezers do. One company required a father and son who worked in different barns to eat their dinners apart in order to avoid exchanging germs. The most high-tech facilities start their herds with piglets fresh from the womb, delivered by cesarean section, scrubbed clean and nursed by a mechanical sow.

[...]

Keeping pigs at just the right temperature allows them to devote every ounce of energy to one purpose: growth. Well, growth and survival. The modern pig is bred too lean to survive Iowa’s winters. The blanket of fat that insulates pigs against the cold does not fetch the price of muscle—that is to say, meat. But producing a layer of back fat takes energy, and energy means feed, which in turn means money. So geneticists have bred most of the lard out of the hog in the last fifty years. Now many of these pigs cannot survive outside the womb of the humming, computerized barn.

Butch led me down the hall, and we peered into two other rooms.

“Look at the uniformity of these litters,” he said with pride, counting. “Two, four, six—ten in that one.”

The piglets looked like they had all been cast in the same mold; they most probably did have the same father. Meatpackers want identical pigs, the better to give customers identical hams. Artificial insemination makes this possible, because breeders can distribute semen from a single exemplary boar all across the country.

This cookie-cutter perfection, however, becomes a liability when a pig gets sick. (If one hog lacks immunity to a disease, it’s likely the others with the same AI father will as well.) But the demand for uniformity outweighs this risk. The more similar the swines, the more easily they fit into the mechanized system, increasing efficiency. For instance, as swine carcasses move down the conveyor belt, at Hormel’s Austin, Minnesota, packing plant, they hit a curved knife, which slices the cylindrical loin from the inside of the body cavity. If the animals aren’t just the right proportions, the knife will hit the wrong spot, wasting meat or cutting into bone.

As with much of corporate Phood -- the demands of the assembly line, packaging, and transport far outweigh any sense of proportion or respect for the animal as a living creature.

I think this perhaps says a great deal:

The meatpacking plant is the model for the efficiencies we associate with factories. After paying a visit to a disassembly line at a slaughterhouse, Henry Ford went back to his Highland Park auto plant and designed something he called an “assembly line.”

whole article is worth a read.

what strikes me is the immense, insane fragility of the entire operation.  all dependent on cheap fossil fuel and high technology, right down the line.  all vulnerable to the point where you can almost hear the cracking of the thin ice.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...