July 31, 2007

 

US environmental group attacks concentrated animal production 

 

 

Rural America is living with "the human health and environmental costs of factory farms," Food & Water Watch chareged in a recently issued report.

 

Workers in animal factories or those living nearby often suffer from the odors and experience a range of negative physical effects, said Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter. She also charged that consumers eating the dairy, egg and meat products produced are faced with the consequences of antibiotic and artificial hormone use and other food safety problems.

 

Calling for an end to factory farming and Congress to make certain that food is produced in a sustainable way that does not harm people and the environment, Food & Water Watch assistant director Patty Lovera said that animal operations are driving more family farmers out of business.

 

The National Chicken Council (NCC) responded to the Food & Water Watch paper by charging that the report was careless with the facts and had a biased outlook.

 

The present system allows more than 30,000 farm families to stay on the land by producing chickens for the integrated companies and the companies also provide more than 250,000 jobs while giving millions of dollars into local economies, the NCC said.

 

Poultry companies have often had to offer competitive wages and benefits to their workers to keep them, NCC said.

 

The poultry association also lambasted the Food & Water Watch paper for calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel ongoing air emission tests on animal production facilities and derided the organization as an unreasoning entity.

 

Food & Water Watch's "Turning Farms into Factories" report, released a national map illustrating the concentration of facilities in some regions of the country.

 

With the map, Food & Water Watch said it is showing how confined animal feeding operations can be found throughout the country, but some regions host a comparatively large share of intensive animal production: Iowa and North Carolina for hogs, California and Idaho for dairy cows, Texas and Kansas for cattle feedlots, Georgia and Alabama for broiler chickens and Iowa and Ohio for egg production.

 

The environmental group highlighted in its report the harmful effects of the animal production system currently:  About half the corn and soy are converted to feed for the livestock industry. The animal factories actually benefit unfairly from subsidies given to these corn and soy growers. Meanwhile, the enormous amounts of wastes produced by the animals have a direct harmful impact on the environment and liberal use of antibiotics on livestock are threatening human health.