Farmageddon: The True
Cost of Cheap Meat (2014)
is a non-fiction book by Philip
Lymbery and
Isabel Oakeshott. It surveys the effects of industrial livestock production and
industrial fish farming around the world. The book is the result of Lymbery's
investigations for which he travelled the world over three years. Isabel
Oakeshott is the political editor of The
Sunday Times, Philip Lymbery is CEO of Compassion in World Farming. The
book was published by Bloomsbury.
The thesis examined in the book
is that globalised production chains of industrialised agricultural systems negatively
affect farmed animals, human health, the countryside, rivers and oceans,
biodiversity in rain-forests and many of the world's poorest people. The authors
seek to shed light on the conditions in intensive agriculture which, according
to them, often differ from the image that the industry wants to sell to the
public. Intensification in animal farming goes along with a growing demand of
cropland to grow animal feed – factory farming is thus not a means to save
space.
They argue consequently
that to feed the world population factory farming is not the solution but a
threat, not least since more than a third of the world's arable harvests are
being used to supply farmed animals. According
to the book the consumer price of cheap
meat does
not include the overall costs of industrial meat production.
The reader follows Lymbery's journey from his
start in California's Central Valley. There he finds dairies where 10,000 cows
can be milked at once.
He travels to enormous
piggeries in China and visits the fishmeal
industry of
Peru, which converts millions of tonnes of anchovies to fishmeal for supplying
the livestock industry with feed.
Taiwan he visits a farm
(labelled "organic") where 300,000 laying hens are being starved and
held in batteries.
The author talks to a community
in Mexico in an area dominated by pig sheds. There he documents a lake of
effluent and air and water pollution, and discusses the outbreak of swine flu.
According to Lymbery
veterinarians should not support systems that are "inherently bad for
animal welfare", which allegedly is the case in "mass production of
broiler chickens, caged production of eggs, the large-scale permanent housing
of dairy cows (so-called mega dairies) and highly intensive pig production
where mothering pigs are kept in confinement where they can't turn around for
weeks at a time".
In order to prevent Farmageddon the authors come up with suggestions
for consumers, policy makers and farmers: Consumers should eat less meat. Fish
should be fed to people rather than converted into fishmeal. Animals should be
fed with grass and animal farming should be a pasture-based system. These
changes would save resources by reducing the competition of humans and animals
for food and land.
Because the Farmageddon video is too large for embedding in Blogspot, I have to use another short video dealing with pig mega-farms only.
