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The Dr. Steve Best Narratives:

Part 5: Factory farming, ecocide, mass extinction, and the animal holocaust

A second key contribution of animal rights and vegan proponents involves the critical analysis of the global system of factory farming of animals for meat consumption that emerged after the second World War and spread globally. With roots in the 19th century slaughterhouses whose disassembly lines of cutting up animal bodies influenced Henry Ford’s automobile production lines. These systems of “industrial” or “factory farming,” often referred to as “CAFOs” (concentrated animal feeding operations), view sentient beings as mere things and treat them accordingly, confining them to cramped pens and cages suited to maximal production of profit over consideration of minimizing animal suffering. Also called “agribusiness” to note corporate domination of farming at the expense of small-scale, rural, or family farming, these prison houses and hellholes of animal exploitation continue to expand on a global level as power and control is concentrated in just a few corporate giants such as JBS of Brazil, Tyson Foods in the U.S., and the WH Group of China.

Animal advocates document how factory farming and global meat production is a principal cause of major social and environmental problems, a key contributor to the climate crisis, and a veritable Holocaust involving the massacre of hundreds of billions of animals each year. Animal rights and vegan advocates establish that animal-based agriculture and global meat consumption is incompatible with climate justice goals such as clean air and water, healthy forests, habitat preservation, flourishing biodiversity, and a planet that remains within safe operating boundaries. As well, these perspectives are vital to social goals to improve health, curb diseases and pandemics, increase equality, reduce poverty and hunger, bolster food security, and build truly just and sustainable societies. Animal rights and vegan perspectives illuminate a key reason for inadequate climate solutions given that speciesism that underlies and perpetuates factory farming and meat consumption.

To truly appreciate the analytical, moral, and political deficits of humanism and social justice movements generally, consider the fact that 92.2 billion land animals are slaughtered annually for human consumption, and as many as 124 billion farmed fish are killed each year (see Animal Clock). Death is the sole blessing to the “farmed animals” raised in cramped cages, pens, and other systems of intensive confinement. There they live in constant discomfort, pain, and the worst forms of hell humans can devise. Those with a shred of empathy and a functioning moral compass should regard this carnage as a profound moral issue and top world priority to end. And yet when “progressive” humanists do engage the horrors of factory farming and slaughterhouses, such as one finds in venues such as The Nation, they focus on the treatment of (mostly undocumented) workers who are hyper-exploited in miserable and dangerous conditions. Incredibly, despite this wretched treatment of humans, such journalistic exposés typically say nothing about the far worse exploitation, torture, and mass killing of animals—as if workers were assembling—or rather dissembling—furniture rather than living, sentient, and intelligent beings. Similarly, environmentalists, at best, underscore the ecological impacts of factory farming, but ignore the suffering of other animals.

Agribusiness—large multinational systems of meat and dairy production—has staggering social and environmental consequences. After the energy sector, which produces two-thirds of GHG emissions, agriculture is the largest producer, accounting for a third of all global heat-trapping gases (Crippa et al., 2021). Of this total, livestock production, especially cattle generates a third of food sector emissions and a total global GHG emissions that range from 14.5% on a low estimate to 57% on a high estimate. Incredibly, the livestock sector releases more GHGs than the entire transportation sector combined, including all cars, planes, trains, and boats around the world, and exceeds the emissions produced by the world’s largest national economy, the United States (Bailey et al., 2014). Equally astonishing, the world’s top five meat and dairy corporations produce more annual GHG emissions than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP (Grain, 2018).

The globalization of factory farming is the principle, if not a major contributor to, a host of environmental problems, including deforestation, desertification, habitat destruction, air and water pollution, resource scarcity, and climate change and species extinction. Besides contributing a third or more of total GHG emissions, animal agriculture depends on converting natural ecosystems to croplands and pastures and is responsible for 70% of biodiversity loss and 80% of global deforestation. Excluding Antarctica, one-quarter of the earth’s landmass is used as pastureland for beef production. In addition to CO2, livestock production is a major producer of other GHGs including methane (around 30 times more potent than CO2 and the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide) and nitrous oxide (about 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide).

In this system, crops are grown principally to feed livestock, rather than to feed humans directly, and thus are an extremely inefficient use of land, water, and food—a problem that will become even more critical to food security as global temperatures rise. Resource and land scarcity, moreover, have emerged as key causes of conflicts, wars, and displacement. The insatiable appetite for meat—whether derived from Asian wet markets, African bushmeat, or factory farms—is a principal cause of zoonotic diseases, spillovers, and plagues like Ebola, West Nile virus, bird-flu, and COVID, which in just a few years killed millions of people worldwide. Consumption of meat and dairy products is also a key contributor to several human health crises including obesity, heart disease, and cancer, along with the immense social costs of their treatment. Moreover, the overuse of antibiotic overuse by international meat and dairy producers to control the diseases of confinement and to maximize growth and productivity of animal captives has weakened the human immune system and caused antibiotic resistance unable to compete with emerging superbugs. A recent comprehensive report found that overuse of antibiotics has led to the deaths of one million people and over $400 billion dollars in economic losses each year. Without immediate action, the human death toll linked to factory farming superbugs is on course to double to 2 million by 2050 (World Animal Protection, 2023).

With growing human population numbers, rising incomes, and steady increases in government funding of livestock industries, the problems that stem from agribusiness and meat/dairy consumption are only worsening. Worldwide meat consumption has more than doubled in the last two decades, especially in the developing world, and is expected to rise by 14% in 2030 and to nearly 80% by 2050 (Ranganathan et al., 2016). 2050 is also the year the UN projects that food production will need to increase 70% compared to 2009 to feed a world population of 9 or 10 billion people (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2019). Given the fact that ruminants, above all beef, are responsible for up to half of GHG emissions from agricultural production, “reducing its consumption will likely be an important element to limiting the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius” (Ranganathan et al., 2016). But rather than promoting reductions in meat and dairy consumption government subsidies of the meat/dairy industries continue to climb. The Global Meat and Dairy Complex receives the largest state and private subsidies and these are on track to soar to $1.8 trillion a year by 2030.

Thus, any proposal for a “just transition” to a sustainable society that involves animal-based rather than plant-based foods will fail, resulting in increased land use, more intensive resource consumption, and higher GHG emissions guaranteed to blow past the ominous 2 degrees Celsius benchmark by 2050 within decades, leading runaway global heating. As vegan groups have emphasized for over half a century, dietary choices have a profound impact on the environment, for better or worse. Global emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods (Xu et al., 2021). Compared to an animal-centered diet, a plant-based diet “reduced per person agricultural land use and production-related greenhouse gas emissions by around 50 percent” (Ranganathan et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2021). A major study found that if the world reduced its meat and dairy consumption by half and consumed instead plant-based alternatives, “net reduction of forest and natural land is almost fully halted and agriculture and land use GHG emissions decline by 31% in 2050 compared to 2020” (Kozickaet al., 2023). The science shows unequivocally that “vegan and vegetarian diets [are] associated with the greatest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions” (Willett et al., 2019); consequently, a global shift from animal-based to plant-based foods “could make a significant contribution to a sustainable food future” (Ranganathan et al., 2016).

The perpetuation of the global meat and dairy industries and the animal Holocaust is the most vivid example of human madness, irrationality, and injustice in the modern world. Underpinned by both speciesism and capital profit imperatives, it nonetheless clearly demonstrates the common interests of small farmers, the poor, people of color, workers, health advocates, environmentalists, and animal rights and vegan activists. As an example of a holistic integrative approach, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organization, “One Health,” is premised on the awareness that “the health of people is closely connected to the health of animals and our shared environment”; it thus “work[s] closely with human, animal (domestic and wildlife), and environmental health partners” from regional to international levels. As well, there are forward-thinking food activist groups connecting human, animal, and environmental issues. One such approach (promoting healthy if not vegan food) seeks “A just, equitable and sustainable food system is one that provides physical, economic and community health; regenerates, protects, and respects natural resources and animals; and ensures that all people live with dignity and freedom from oppression and exploitation” (Farm to Table).

These kind of alliances can lead humanity out of the depth of the planetary crisis. The systemic toll of agribusiness, the emergence of food justice politics, human and animal rights groups and environmentalism can provide a key plank in the foundation for a multifaceted justice struggle and an alliance politics seeking to end industrial farming and astronomical levels of global meat consumption in favor of sustainable farming systems, healthier diets, and restored ecosystems. A just transition to sustainable farming would benefit small farmers and local communities in substantial ways, but there must also be a just transition and “Green New Deal” for our fellow species (Hatfthorsonn, 2019; also see Just Rural Transition, 2023).

Selected references

Meat Atlas (2021). Meat Atlas: facts and figures about the animals we eat. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

Animal Clock (https://animalclock.org). 

Mood A. et. al. (2023). Estimating global numbers of farmed fishes killed for food annually from 1990 to 2019(https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/article/estimating-global-numbers-of-farmed-fishes-killed-for-food-annually-from-1990-to-2019/765A7CCA23ADA0249EF37CFC5014D351). 

Crippa M. et.al. (2021. Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions(https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9).

Grain (2018) “Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet”(https://grain.org/article/entries/5976-emissions-impossible-how-big-meat-and-dairy-are-heating-up-the-planet).

World Animal Protection (2023) “Global public health cost of antimicrobial resistance related to antibiotic use on factory farms” (https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/siteassets/reports-programmatic/global-public-health-technical-report.pdf).

Ranganathan J. et. al. (2016) “Shifting diets for a sustainable food future: creating a sustainable food future” (https://files.wri.org/d8/s3fs-public/Shifting_Diets_for_a_Sustainable_Food_Future_1.pdf).

Food and Agriculture Organization (2019) “How to feed the world in 2050” (http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf).

Xu X. et al. (2021). “Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00358-x). 

Kozicka, M. et.al. “Feeding climate and biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat and milk alternatives” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40899-2).

Willett W. et.al. “Food in the anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67361831788-4/abstract). 

Farm to Table (https://farmtotablenm.org/mission-and-values/). 

Hatfthorsonn J. K. (2019) “Green New Deal: A Just Transition for Animals” (https://weanimalsmedia.org/2019/12/20/green-new-deal-a-just-transition-for-animals/#:~:text=A%20post%2Dcarbon%20future%20is,other%2C%20animals%20and%20the%20Earth).

Just Rural Transition (2023) “Principles for Just Food System Transitions: Envisioning a more equitable and sustainable future – and an inclusive path to achieving it” (https://justruraltransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/04/JRT_Principles_Report_170423.pdf).