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The world is slowly waking-up to the fact that intensive farming is having a terrifying impact on our planet.
More and more people are also starting to see the pain and suffering inflicted on animals within the factory farming complex.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations [FAO] celebrates World Food Day every year on October 16.
According to the FAO: “World Food Day is a chance to show our commitment to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 – to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.”
Inertia
According to Compassion in World Farming: “
It has long been recognised that high-input,
resource-intensive farming systems are harmful
and unsustainable; yet there has been
considerable intertia around action to deliver
healthy and sustainable food systems.”
The organization listed a number of facts about intensive food production in its Towards A Flourishing Food System handbook – the facts below come from the book.
1.
Feeding human-edible grain to animals is a waste
The UN Environment Programme calculates
that over 3.5 billion people could be fed by
the grain that will be fed to animals by 2050
in the business-as-usual model.
If a target
were adopted of halving the use of
cereals for feed an extra 1.75 billion
people could be fed.
2. Antimicrobial resistance
Antimicrobials are
regularly used in industrial livestock systems to prevent the diseases that would
otherwise be inevitable where animals are confined in crowded, stressful conditions
and are bred and managed for maximum
yield.
These conditions compromise their
health and immune responses, and encourage
disease to develop and spread.
To prevent this,
antimicrobials are routinely given to whole
herds or flocks of healthy animals via their
feed and water.
The World Health Organisation [WHO] stresses that the high use of antimicrobials in farming
contributes to the transfer of resistant
bacteria to people thereby undermining
the treatment of serious human disease.
3.
Halting biodiversity loss
United Nations Environment [UNEP] states that modern agricultural practices have been ‘responsible for considerable
damage to biodiversity, primarily through
land-use conversion but also through
overexploitation, intensification of agricultural
production systems, excessive chemical and
water use, nutrient loading, pollution’.
4.
Intensive livestock production is an inherently
inefficient use of resources
Intensive
livestock production is dependent on feeding
human-edible cereals to livestock who convert
them very inefficiently into meat and milk:
experts variously describe the use of cereals to
feed animals as ‘staggeringly inefficient’ and ‘colossally inefficient’.
Why is this?
For every 100 calories fed to animals as cereals, just 17-30 calories enter the human food chain as meat.
Some studies indicate that the conversion rates may be even lower.
5.
Generating disease
Industrial livestock
production plays an important part in the
emergence, spread and ampli cation of
pathogens, some of which are zoonotic (i.e. a disease that can be spread from animals to humans).
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