EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) stink—literally and figuratively. They are livestock agribusinesses that congregate animals in confined lots where the food is brought to them, instead of the animals seeking food in pastures, fields or rangeland. Animals are crowded, traumatized, in abysmal health and become what Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls “angry meat.” In his book, Anger, he suggests that people who eat angry meat are more inclined to express anger. If that is too mind-bending, consider at least that raising factory-farmed meat might produce angry neighbors.

Now, a CAFO in Mexico has been identified as the potential source of the current swine-flu outbreak. La Gloria, in the state of Veracruz, is home to Granjas Carroll de Mexico, a facility that raised almost a million pigs in 2008. It is partly owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest producer of pork products. Farming trade groups claim that it is impossible to catch the virus from cooked meat. They are not mentioning, however, that the swine-flu (or H1N1) virus has circulated in pig populations since the 1918 pandemic and was first discovered on a factory farm in North Carolina in 1998.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that factory farms can threaten the health of farm workers, who can develop acute and chronic lung disease and may catch infections that transmit from animals to human beings. According to Veratect, an organization that tracks animal and human infectious disease, a municipal health official in Veracruz stated that a preliminary investigation indicates the disease vector for the H1N1 virus was a type of fly that reproduces in manure ponds and that the outbreak was linked to pig farms.

Since December 2008 until the end of March 2009, roughly one-sixth of La Gloria’s 4,000 inhabitants suffered from respiratory illness; many of them work and live in Mexico City during the week. A four-year-old boy from La Gloria is believed to be the first confirmed victim of swine flu. He has since made a full recovery.

Granjas Carroll de Mexico was built 15 years ago, after the NAFTA accord began allowing US conglomerates to set up operations in Mexico. Less than three years later, protesters from Veracruz—who call themselves Los 400 Pueblos—began staging regular marches in the streets of Mexico City to protest injustice against the rural, poor indigenous of Veracruz. La Gloria citizens have been speaking out against environmental practices of Granjas Carroll for several years and now, according to the Mexican newspaper La Reforma, are being harassed, threatened and even jailed for doing so.

It appears that the true origin of the current swine-flu outbreak is not being widely reported or is altogether avoided. Just as governments and industry suppressed the cause and prevalence of Mad Cow Disease (BSE—Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), I’m beginning to smell a rat.

Or should I say, a CAFO.

Further recommended reading:
Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's RSS feed

Write comment