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Factory farming of animals is often justified as a “necessary evil” in order to feed the poor cheaply. Now a leading Poverty Alleviation NGO suggests that the poor are not the beneficiaries of Industrial Farming and every one of us will pay the bills resulting from the serious environmental costs it has incurred. Associate Professor ANDRIES DU TOIT, Deputy Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, spoke to Animal Voice about some of the issues at stake. Animal Voice: Industrial Farming has long been punted as a panacea for world poverty. In your article in the Cape Times on 26th August 2008, you suggest that this ‘giant’ is now showing itself to have ‘clay feet’. AduT: It is now clear that the world food order is unable to ensure food security for large sections of the world’s population and, with its massive impact on climate change, industrial agriculture is not sustainable in the long run. Animal Voice: You are on record as saying that the ‘virtual’ costs of factory or industrial farming must be factored into the equation. Can you explain what you mean by ‘virtual’ please. AduT: When you look at how much water people use, for example, you need to look beyond direct consumption and factor in additional costs like the water needed to produce what they use. We can call this virtual water. So, for instance, the average Briton uses 150 litres of water a day. But the figure is closer to 4600 litres a day when indirect or virtual consumption is factored in. By comparison, the average person in a developing country uses less than 1000 litres of virtual water. So Europe and the UK are importing ‘virtual water’ - there is a net flow of this resource into the North; and ironically most of the ‘exporters’ are semi-arid countries like South Africa, Kenya, Portugal and Spain, that have not got a lot of water to start with. Animal Voice: It was suggested by the Independent on Sunday on 21 September 2008 that the food price hikes are hitting South Africa’s poor people like a ‘silent Tsunami’. AduT: The main contributory factors to the current price hikes are the relatively poor wheat harvest in Australia, the rise in demand for grains by the biofuel industry, and the impact of price speculation on global food markets. Another significant contributory factor is China’s huge acceleration in its consumption of pork. Grains that could be distributed for human use are going to feed pigs for pork. Animal Voice: Would you suggest that we should eat less meat? AduT: There are good reasons to limit our consumption of meat. In terms of land available, the global footprint of agriculture just in land use terms would be less if we did not have a meat industry, because so much grain production happens for feedstock purposes. To give you more insight into this, the ‘meatification’ of our diets since World War 2 has meant that the population of farm animals has been increasing faster than that of humans – with a massive impact on climate change. I would suggest there are three compelling reasons for a radical reduction in the amount of meat people consume - Poverty, Climate Change and Animal Ethics. But meat-eating is central to our cultures so this is a battle that is going to be difficult to win. |
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