Tracey Worcester, the Marchioness of Worcester, at her home in Badminton, Gloucestershire. The former actress is a long time campaigner.
As reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy will be debated in the European Parliament this summer, three MEPs Jose Bove, Dan Jørgensen and Janusz Wojciechowski invited me host an event entitled The Hidden Cost of Factory Farming to inform their colleagues in the EU Parliament and Commission that 'cheap' meat would be very expensive if factory farms were forced to pay their true costs.
Jose Bove, once a farmer himself, has for years opposed genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture, and after being arrested for dismantling a McDonalds hamburger outlet that threatened to destroy his town's economy, is now a member of European Parliament.
At the first of my trilogy of Government events held at the House of Commons, we showed clips from my film Pig Business. However, Bove insisted we screen the full length version. I was sceptical if busy MEPs and officials would bother to watch an hour-long polemic, but to my surprise the 280 seater room was packed full with MEPs, EU Council and Commission officials, environmental, health and animal welfare NGOs, and the international press.
On March 9, I will be holding a screening and panel discussion at the US Congress which is considering legislative proposals to improve farm animal welfare and restrict the use of antibiotics.
Although adding antibiotics to pig feed to promote growth has been banned in the EU since 2003, it is still allowed in the US. Doctors and scientists are concerned that this practice is leading to new antibiotic resistant diseases which, like MRSA, pass from pigs to humans. A pilot study in Iowa found the MRSA pig strain in 45 per cent of workers and 49 per cent of pigs.
Co-hosted by Bobby Kennedy Jr, nephew of John Kennedy the late US President, the Congress event comes at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency has retrieved some of the power taken from it by the Bush administration, and will apply stricter regulations to factory farm waste.
Smithfield and other factory producers store the waste in stinking lagoons and spray it on fields, a system which pollutes the coastline causing massive fish kills, and sickens neighbouring residents.
In March 2010 a court in Missouri ordered a Smithfield Foods subsidiary to pay local residents $11 million for "odours so offensive that they defied description," said Stephen A. Weiss, a New York attorney who represented the families. He continues: "These corporations have chosen to invade traditional family farming communities and construct industrial operations that simply fail to respect the community and the land."
The US still allows pregnant sows to be confined in steel cages so narrow that they cannot turn around or lie down properly. 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 Congress Event, I will be back in Brussels working on MEP, Janusz Wojciechowski's suggestion that we invite a few sympathetic MEPs to join us in compiling a declaration on the need for CAP to stop financing industrial farming, spend more on supporting traditional small and medium scale mixed crop and livestock farming and introduce method of production labelling. We will then endeavour to get all but the die-hard neo liberal MEPs to sign the declaration and ensure it is the focus of the CAP reforms.
In his Brussels speech after the screening, Jose Bove said, "following the deregulation of markets and open ports, come the big firms, like Cargill, Tyson and Smithfield and with them the concentration of production that is causing the elimination of small farmers."
Bove continued: "If the CAP supports a system of agriculture that destroys the environment and makes poor quality industrial products, I do not see why Europeans would want to subsidise it. Everyone knows that 75 per cent of aid goes to 25 per cent of farmers."
Janusz Wojciechowsk, another fighter for the survival of small farmers in the EU Parliament, chose to co-host the EU screening as much of the film was shot in his native Poland. At the time I was filming in 2005 his political party was trying defiantly to resist the assault by the US giant Smithfield Foods on the livelihoods of Poland's family farms and thriving rural communities.
Smithfield had taken advantage of the previous government's neo liberal policies of free trade while Poland was in transition to a market economy, and Smithfield was wreaking havoc on their environment, economy and pigs by buying up ex state farms for, what its CEO boasted, were 'small dollars'.
Smithfield's exploitation of cheap labour and lax environmental standards in Poland gave it the competitive edge so that many EU farmers must either get big and externalise their costs on to the broader community or get out of pig farming.
The Event was held to highlight the hidden costs of factory farming on pigs, people and the planet and of course the farmers themselves. The event followed a 'winter of discontent' for pig farmers facing low supermarket prices for pork, high 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 nearby urban areas.
Following the screening and presentations from a panel of experts, there was a heated discussion that reinforced the film's findings that factory farms across Europe disregard legal animal welfare standards, threaten human health by over- reliance on antibiotics and force traditional farmers out of business.
Andrea Gavinelli, Head of the Animal Welfare Unit of the European Commission, said after the event:
"The screening was a moment of transparency and reflection. It brought a clear message about what is really happening that people don't know."
A recent survey found that 50 per cent of consumers across the EU believe that pigs are 'fairly well treated' and have no idea of the horrendous conditions suffered by pigs in factory farms.
I believe that pork should be labelled with the production method. Just as eggs must according to EU law, be labelled if they are from caged hens, the same rule could apply to pigs which are crammed into barren concrete and metal pens with no access to natural light or air? Consumers who have watched Pig Business say they will never buy factory pork again.
Not least due to the threat to human health as Coilin Nunan, advisor to the Soil Association, warned "human health is at risk because the routine preventative use of antibiotics in factory farms is causing an increasing number of diseases such as campylobacter and salmonella to become resistant to antibiotics".
In the UK, primogeniture has kept the size of farms relatively large. However, it's a different story in Europe as Friends of the Earth food campaigner, Mute Schimpf explained: "The average farm in Europe is 12 hectares. In order to develop a vision for food and agriculture policy, we need to think about the farmers in Europe and not about the lobbies and unions who only think about the competitiveness of bigger farms who frankly don't need don't need public support"
Gerald Choplin, from European Coordination Via Campesina, which represents farmers from 70 countries, said: "In the EU there aren't many farmers but there are too many pigs".
He continued: "Because of the very good attendance it was a useful debate and helpful for our work not only against big factory farms and for small scale traditional farming methods. The fact that there were many people from big business and from the Commission, it showed that they also felt obliged to hear the debate around a very different CAP."
Though I am largely against giving powers to the EU to dictate rules on nations, when I hear our DEFRA minister Caroline Spelman argue that CAP support for farmers should be phased out, (following the American model of allowing family farmers to be bankrupted by unfairly subsidised competition), I pray that her free trade agenda will be overruled by the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Dacian Ciolos.
His proposals are to limit subsidies to industrial size farms and increase payments to farmers whose competitiveness is reduced by their obligation to adhere to higher EU standards, and for their provision of public goods, such as conservation of biodiversity, which are not remunerated by the market. The giants should be taxed to remunerate society for the true costs of their production.
I prefer another option that pulls the unpopular term 'protectionism out of the bin. I believe that food and agricultural goods should be exempted from World Trade Organisation (WTO) global trade rules so that all nations have the right to protect against low cost imports.
Governments could then procure high welfare and sustainably produced meat from local farmers for public services like schools and hospitals.
thissomerset
Meat Trade News Daily Supporting British Pig Farmers
Source: newsroom - meattradenewsdaily.co.uk
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