There’s a paywall, but the problem is obvious:
Antibiotics is cheaper than a healthy environment.
So unless there’s government regulations (and enforcement) corpo farms who produce most of our food will cram too many animals together and shoot them full of antibiotics.
Completely true.
It’s also true that an international free market in animal products means that the agricultural lobby is pegged to the lowest possible health and welfare standards.
Farming is very politicised.
the agricultural lobby is pegged to the lowest possible health and welfare standards.
That’s what they want us to think.
We can 100% require standards, send investigators, and even collaborate with other countries or coalitions like EU to spread the burden.
Countries that don’t meet requirements can face massive tarrifs to equalize the playing field or outright bans.
And the US is the largest consumer of beef, China is catching up and with a low per capital consumption they can make a huge leap if they got cheap unethical meet. But they don’t need to import much.
So foreign producers still need the US market, and their citizens already consume as much as us
Again, I totally agree. I just don’t see that ever coming from the industry in its current form. Everyone else needs to be demanding better standards from their government. They also need to get comfortable with the idea that the cost of it will have to be shifted away from health and welfare to somewhere else, whether that’s consumer prices or government subsidies. My preference would be to enforce higher standards and let the industry move away from using animals for food.
https://archive.is/oYVuY for the paywall
Unfortunately that’s not enough to solve the disease problem. The biggest problem is that the production and consumption levels are high for meat, dairy, etc. There’s a good paper which talks about animal agriculture having a “disease trap” of sorts. (The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture)
The gist is that if you operate with intensified animal agriculture, there’s the obvious disease risk with tons of creatures close together. However, if you try to do less intensive production, you increase land usage significantly which increases deforestation and thus zoonetic disease risk by exposing more wild animals to human populations
The main way out is to move away from the industry and towards the direction of plant-based diets which take up less land and don’t have the crowding issues
Spoiler: Antibiotic use in farm animals is fucking up their effectiveness for the rest of us, etc.
the future is vegan or we might not get one.
